Comment on "Diffusion Monte Carlo study of jellium surfaces: Electronic densities and pair correlation functions"

TL;DR

This paper reanalyzes previous diffusion Monte Carlo data on jellium surfaces, showing that the surface energies are closer to local-density approximation predictions than initially reported, and that fixed-node errors may cancel out.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the fixed-node errors in earlier calculations likely cancel, leading to surface energy estimates that align more closely with LDA and RPA results.

Findings

Surface energies are closer to LDA predictions.

Fixed-node errors may cancel in slab and bulk calculations.

Results are in reasonable agreement with RPA.

Abstract

In a fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo calculation of the total energy of jellium slabs, Acioli and Ceperley [Phys. Rev. B {\bf 54}, 17199 (1996)] reported jellium surface energies that at low electron densities were significantly higher than those predicted in the local-density approximation (LDA) of density-functional theory. Assuming that the fixed-node error in the slab and the bulk calculations cancel out, we show that their data yield surface energies that are considerably closer to the LDA and in reasonable agreement with those obtained in the random-phase approximation.