Many-electron Trial wave functions for Nonuniform Systems

The long-range electronic correlations in a uniform electron gas may be deduced from the random phase approximation (RPA) of Bohm and Pines. We generalize the RPA to nonuniform systems and use it to derive many-electron Slater-Jastrow wave functions. The RPA theory fixes the long-range behavior of the inhomogeneous two-body term in the Jastrow factor and provides an accurate analytic expression for the one-body term. We test the formalism for a strongly inhomogeneous electron gas using variational Monte Carlo simulations.