Quantum Monte Carlo modeling of the spherically averaged structure factor of a many-electron system

The interaction and exchange-correlation contributions to the ground-state energy of an arbitrary many-electron system can be obtained from a spherical average of the wave-vector-dependent diagonal structure factor (SF). We model the continuous-k spherically averaged SF using quantum Monte Carlo calculations in finite simulation cells. We thus derive a method that allows us to substantially reduce the troublesome Coulomb finite-size errors that are usually present in ground-state energy calculations. To demonstrate this, we perform variational Monte Carlo calculations of the interaction energy of the homogeneous electron gas. The method is, however, equally applicable to arbitrary inhomogeneous systems.