Application of the Colle–Salvetti model to the uniform electron gas

Abstract

An application of the Colle–Salvetti wave function (Colle and Salvetti in Theor Chim Acta 37: 329, 1975) to the uniform electron gas model is made. Some different levels of approximation are used. Contrarily to the previous conclusions of other work (Tao et al. in Phys Rev A 63: 032513, 2001), the present result shows that the Colle–Salvetti wave function is able to reproduce, to a semiquantitative level, the properties of the uniform electron gas. The most important request for this result is an apropiate choice for the value of the only parameter entering in the Colle–Salvetti wave function. The present results are a good complement to those obtained by Moscardo et al. (Theor Chem Accounts 115: 334, 2006) for atoms. On the basis of the results obtained in this paper, a very simple functional for the correlation energy is put forward. Its application to the uniform electron gas, lead to a very reasonable set of results. It can be concluded that the Colle–Salvetti wave function remains being a good option to built, in an approximate way, the correlation component of a N-electron system.