Ultracold atoms at unitarity within quantum Monte Carlo

Variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (VMC and DMC) calculations of the properties of the zero-temperature fermionic gas at unitarity are reported. The ratio of the energy of the interacting to the non-interacting gas for a system of 128 particles is calculated to be 0.4517(3) in VMC and 0.4339(1) in the more accurate DMC method. The spherically-averaged pair-correlation functions, momentum densities, and one-body density matrices are very similar in VMC and DMC, but the two-body density matrices and condensate fractions show some differences. Our best estimate of the condensate fraction of 0.51 is a little smaller than values from other quantum Monte Carlo calculations

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

We present a 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 rs=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