  The formation energy of a solid surface can be extracted from slab
calculations if the bulk energy per atom is known. It has been pointed out
previously that the resulting surface energy will diverge with slab thickness
if the bulk energy is in error, in the context of calculations which used
different methods to study the bulk and slab systems. We show here that this
result is equally relevant for state-of-the-art computational methods which
carefully treat bulk and slab systems in the same way. Here we compare
different approaches, and present a solution to the problem that eliminates the
divergence and leads to rapidly convergent and accurate surface energies.
