Ab Initio Path Integral Monte Carlo Simulations of the Uniform Electron Gas on Large Length Scales.

Abstract

The accurate description of non-ideal quantum many-body systems is of prime importance for a host of applications within physics, quantum chemistry, materials science, and related disciplines. At finite temperatures, the gold standard is given by ab initio path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations, which do not require any empirical input but exhibit an exponential increase in the required computation time for Fermionic systems with an increase in system size N. Very recently, computing Fermionic properties without this bottleneck based on PIMC simulations of fictitious identical particles has been suggested. In our work, we use this technique to perform very large (N ≤ 1000) PIMC simulations of the warm dense electron gas and demonstrate that it is capable of providing a highly accurate description of the investigated properties, i.e., the static structure factor, the static density response function, and the local field correction, over the entire range of length scales.