We calculated the exchange, correlation and total energies of clusters of alkali metals with N=1-150 atoms in the spherical jellium model. The calculations were made using the Kohn-Sham method with exchange and correlation energies evaluated in the meta-generalized gradient approximation (MGGA), proposed by J. P. Perdew, S. Kurth, A. Zupan and P. Blaha, in the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) of J. P. Perdew, K. Burke and M. Ernzerhof, and in the Local Density Approximation (LDA). We evaluated the relative deviations of MGGA and GGA energies with respect to LDA. Exchange energies of MGGA and GGA are more negative than the LDA exchange energy and become closer to this as the cluster size increases. On the other hand, the GGA and MGGA correlation energies, which are almost identical, are less negative than LDA. The deviations of GGA and MGGA exchange-correlation energies with respect to LDA are smaller than those of the exchange and correlation energies separately. For clusters with 18 and 20 atoms we have compared our jellium results with Variational and Diffusion Monte-Carlo results. Errors of LDA for exchange and correlation tend to cancel so that the total exchange-correlation energy is close to the Monte-Carlo results. Similar cancellations occur with GGA and MGGA. We also examined the validity of the liquid drop model.
Semi-local density functional for the exchange-correlation energy of electrons in two dimensions