An accurate and compact wave function for the 4He dimer

We introduce a local measure of the quality of a trial wave function: the local variance. Using this tool we examine the pair function often adopted to construct wave functions for small helium clusters and apply it to a wave function for 4He2 using the TTY interaction potential. Our analysis shows that this commonly employed functional form should be improved in the short-range region. We introduce a new model based on the short-range behaviour of the exact ground-state solution of a Morse potential. The resulting compact trial wave function for 4He2 recovers 98% of the exact binding energy with only six variational parameters.