Abstract
We report an ab initio evaluation of the surface energy of a simple metal, performed via a coupling-constant integration over the dynamical density-response function. The rapid rate of change of the electron density at the surface is treated exactly. Long-range correlations are treated self-consistently in the random-phase approximation; short range correlations are included in time-dependent local density-functional theory. Our results provide a numerical measure of the error introduced by the usual local-density approximation; this error is found to be small.
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