  The role that non-local short-range correlation plays at metal surfaces is
investigated by analyzing the correlation surface energy into contributions
from dynamical density fluctuations of various two-dimensional wave vectors.
Although short-range correlation is known to yield considerable correction to
the ground-state energy of both uniform and non-uniform systems, short-range
correlation effects on intermediate and short-wavelength contributions to the
surface formation energy are found to compensate one another. As a result, our
calculated surface energies, which are based on a non-local
exchange-correlation kernel that provides accurate total energies of a uniform
electron gas, are found to be very close to those obtained in the random-phase
approximation and support the conclusion that the error introduced by the
local-density approximation is small.
