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

Abstract

We present a novel 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 $r_{\rm s}=0.5$ 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.