A new ground-state wavefunction for liquid⁴He

Abstract

A product-of-pairs wavefunction for calculation of the ground-state properties of liquid 4He is constructed by using zero-energy s-wave solutions of the two-body Schrodinger equation. Preliminary Monte Carlo calculations for the Lennard-Jones potential yield results essentially identical to the results of previous variational calculations but with considerably less computing effort. It is argued that the use of the procedure presented here with more realistic potentials should yield results in better agreement with experiment.