Charge and spin correlations of a one-dimensional electron gas on the continuum.

We present a variational Monte Carlo study of a model one-dimensional electron gas on the continuum, with long-range interaction (1/r decay). At low density, the reduced dimensionality brings about pseudonodes of the many-body wavefunction, yielding nonergodic behavior of naive Monte Carlo sampling, which affects the evaluation of pair correlations and the related structure factors. The problem is, however, easily solved, and we carefully analyzed the structure factors obtained from an optimal trial function, finding good agreement with the exact predictions for a Luttinger-like Hamiltonian with an interaction similar to the one used in the present study.