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

Abstract

In a fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo calculation of the total energy of jellium slabs, Acioli and Ceperley [Phys. Rev. B 54, 17 199 (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.