The VMC results for the energy gaps at all possible 
-points
in an n=2 simulation cell are summarised in
Table 
. For each of the -points then=2
LDA results and n=2 Hartree-Fock results have been included for
comparison. The Hartree-Fock results were obtained using the fixed
orbitals from the corresponding LDA calculation rather than performing
a fully relaxed Hartree-Fock calculation. The LDA bandstructure
exhibits virtually no finite size effect (<0.2 eV at all points across
the band), whereas the HF bandstructure exhibits a large finite size
effect[112] (>3.0 eV at all point across the band).
| Band | VMC (eV) | HF (eV) | LDA (eV) | Experiment[94] (eV) |
 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
 | 2.6  0.4 | 5.0 | 2.43 | 3.4 |
 | -4.1 0.4 | -3.31 | -2.93 | -2.9 |
 | 3.7 0.4 | 2.73 | 0.46 | 1.17 |
 | -1.6 0.4 | -1.36 | -1.23 | -1.2 0.2 |
 | 2.0 0.4 | 4.0 | 1.39 | 2.23 |
The results for VMC, LDA, HF and experiment have all been aligned by
setting the value of 
in each case. The values at each of
the points in the bandstructure can then be obtained relative to this
point, for example
where 
refers to the ground state energy of a system
with an extra electron added into an orbital that describes the bottom
of the conduction band at the 
-point and 
refers to
the ground state energy of a system with an electron removed from an
orbital that describes the top of the valence band at the X-point.
It can be clearly seen that the LDA gives the valence band energies
(relative to ) at each of the -points more
accurately than the conduction band energies. The LDA significantly
underestimates all the band gaps.
The quality of the VMC results is mixed. At the - and
L-points, the results are broadly in agreement with experiment. At
the X-point the VMC overestimates the size of the gap. The errors in
the VMC calculations are due to the quality of the trial wavefunction
used and finite size effects. As mentioned in section ,
the function for the excited states has a higher symmetry than the
excited state charge density and the u function takes no account of
any changes in the shape of the exchange-correlation hole due to the
addition/removal of electrons. All the VMC trial wavefunctions
contain a Slater determinant constructed using orbitals from a
groundstate LDA calculation. The effect of allowing these orbitals to
relax were suspected to be too small to resolve in VMC, but has been
examined in DMC in the following section.
