A new self-consistent quasistatic screening approach is proposed for studying the properties of an interacting electron gas. The compressibility divergence and the ferromagnetic instability found in the static unscreened Hartree-Fock approximation are nonexistent in this scheme. A better fit to the experimental data on the plasma dispersion relation than the existing calculations for free-electron metals is obtained.

• Received 15 June 1973

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.9.2000