Vosko-Wilk-Nusair formula

The correlation energy of a uniform electron gas has been determined by Monte Carlo methods for a number of different densities. In order to use these results in DFT calculations, it is desirable to have a suitable analytic interpolation formula. This has been constructed by Vosko, Wilk and Nusair (VWN) and is in general considered to be a very accurate fit. It interpolates between die unpolarized ( = 0) and spin polarized (C = 1) limits by the following functional. 

The simplest approximation, employed for very many years until the most recent developments, is known as Local Spin Density Approximation (LSDA) and does not depend on the gradients of the electronic density but only on the electronic density itself. One of the variants of LSDA, commonly employed in the applications to molecular systems in the last years, is the one called SVWN. In this exchange-correlation functional, the exchange is provided by Slater s formula (3) for the uniform electron gas, whereas the correlation is evaluated according to the expression derived by Vosko, Wilk and Nusair (4) from an interpolation of previous Monte-Carlo results for the spin-polarized homogeneous electron gas... 

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