Work function and image-plane position of metal surfaces

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Abstract
We present fully-self-consistent calculations of the electron density in some characteristic simple-metal surfaces. We obtain exact numerical results for the electron density using local pseudopotentials averaged in the directions parallel to the surface and very-thick-slab geometries. The resulting work functions considerably improve the agreement between experiment and perturbative results. Our results show that the distance of the image plane to the first atomic layer depends only weakly on the crystallographic orientation of the surface, in marked contrast with the strong dependence predicted from the jellium model.