Correlation energy of the spin-polarized electron liquid by quantum Monte Carlo

TL;DR

This paper employs quantum Monte Carlo methods to accurately compute the correlation energy of a spin-polarized electron liquid across various densities, providing data and a parameterized correlation function for inhomogeneous systems.

Contribution

It introduces precise quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the spin-polarized electron liquid's correlation energy and develops a parameterized correlation function for inhomogeneous systems.

Findings

Ground state energies for different densities are reported.

Finite-size errors are corrected using twist-averaged boundary conditions.

A parameterized correlation function for inhomogeneous systems is developed.

Abstract

Variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (VMC and DMC) methods with Slater-Jastrow-backflow trial wave functions are used to study the spin-polarized three-dimensional uniform electron fluid. We report ground state VMC and DMC energies in the density range $0.5 \leq r_\text{s} \leq 20$. Finite-size errors are corrected using canonical-ensemble twist-averaged boundary conditions and extrapolation of the twist-averaged energy per particle calculated at three system sizes (N=113, 259, and 387) to the thermodynamic limit of infinite system size. The DMC energies in the thermodynamic limit are used to parameterize a local spin density approximation correlation function for inhomogeneous electron systems.