Ab initio calculations of the cohesive energy and the bulk modulus of aluminium

To date there have been few attempts to calculate bulk properties such as the cohesive energy or the bulk modulus of metals using Monte Carlo (MC) methods. We present a variational MC calculation for aluminium and find that methods used to deal with finite-size effects work just as well as for insulators, despite the presence of a Fermi surface. However, the large statistical uncertainties are a problem when evaluating the bulk modulus.