Description of a homogeneous electron gas with simple functionals of the one-particle density matrix

Abstract

The momentum distributions of a homogeneous electron gas, arising from a simple one-matrix functional for the electron-electron repulsion energy that generalizes the Hartree-Fock and Goedecker-Umrigar approximations, are analyzed in detail. Their properties are found to depend strongly on the exponent \ensuremath{\beta} that enters the functional. Smooth momentum distributions that, together with the corresponding energies per particle, exhibit simple scaling behavior with respect to the electron density \ensuremath{\rho}, are obtained only for $\frac{4}{5}<\ensuremath{\beta}<\frac{4}{3}$ and $\ensuremath{\rho}<~{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\mathrm{crit}}(\ensuremath{\beta}).$