Two-Electron Correlations in the Metallic Electron Gas
Abstract
We present high-precision \emph{ab initio} calculations of the four-point vertex function for the three-dimensional uniform electron gas using variational diagrammatic Monte Carlo. From these results, we extract Landau parameters that reveal a density-driven crossover from underscreening to overscreening, and obtain the full two-electron scattering amplitude on the Fermi surface with controlled accuracy. A residual analysis of the scattering amplitude against the charge-channel Kukkonen--Overhauser (KO) interaction shows that only a minimal s-wave correction in the antiparallel-spin channel is needed, defining the sKO ansatz: KO within the local-density approximation plus this short-range correction. Using both our direct VDMC amplitudes and the sKO ansatz, we compute the electron-electron contribution to the thermal resistivity, obtaining quantitative agreement with experiments on simple metals (Al, Na, K, Rb). sKO thus provides a transferable effective interaction for first-principles transport calculations in metals.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.22927,
title = {Two-Electron Correlations in the Metallic Electron Gas},
author = {Zhiyi Li and Pengcheng Hou and Bao-Zong Wang and Youjin Deng and Kun Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.22927},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
14 pages, 9 figures