Benchmark quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the ground-state kinetic, interaction and total energy of the three-dimensional electron gas.

We report variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo ground-state energies of the three-dimensional electron gas using a model periodic Coulomb interaction and backflow corrections for N = 54, 102, 178, and 226 electrons. We remove finite-size effects by extrapolation and we find lower energies than previously reported. Using the Hellman-Feynman operator sampling method introduced in Gaudoin and Pitarke (2007 Phys. Rev. Lett. 99 126406), we compute accurately, within the fixed-node approximation, the separate kinetic and interaction contributions to the total ground-state energy. The difference between the interaction energies obtained from the original Slater-determinant nodes and the backflow-displaced nodes is found to be considerably larger than the difference between the corresponding kinetic energies.

Hellman-Feynman operator sampling in diffusion Monte Carlo calculations.

Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) calculations typically yield highly accurate results in solid-state and quantum-chemical calculations. However, operators that do not commute with the Hamiltonian are at best sampled correctly up to second order in the error of the underlying trial wave function once simple corrections have been applied. This error is of the same order as that for the energy in variational calculations. Operators that suffer from these problems include potential energies and the density. This Letter presents a new method, based on the Hellman-Feynman theorem, for the correct DMC sampling of all operators diagonal in real space. Our method is easy to implement in any standard DMC code.

Lack of Hohenberg-Kohn theorem for excited states.

For a given excited state there exist densities that arise from more than one external potential. This is due to a qualitatively different energy-density relationship from that of the ground state and is related to positive eigenvalues in the nonlocal susceptibility for excited states. Resulting problems with the generalization of the density functional methodology to excited states are discussed.