Correlation energy of the spin-polarized electron liquid studied using quantum Monte Carlo simulations

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 $0.5\le r_{\text{s}}\le 20$. 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 $(N=113, 259, \mathrm{and} 387)$ to the thermodynamic limit of infinite system size. The DMC energies in the thermodynamic limit are used to parametrize a local spin density approximation correlation function for inhomogeneous electron systems.

Figure 1

Difference between FS corrections obtained analytically and by extrapolation DMC energies to infinite system size using Eq. (1), plotted against density parameter $r_{\text{s}}$.