Correlation energies of the high-density spin-polarized electron gas to meV accuracy

Abstract

We present a combination of quantum Monte Carlo methods and a finite-size extrapolation framework with which we calculate the thermodynamic limit of the exact correlation energy of the polarized electron gas at high densities to meV accuracy, −40.44(5) and −31.70(4) mHa at rs=0.5 and 1, respectively. The fixed-node error is characterized and found to exceed 1 mHa, and we show that the magnitude of the correlation energy of the polarized electron gas is underestimated by up to 6 meV by the Perdew-Wang parametrization, for which we suggest improvements.