Nature and Strength of Interlayer Binding in Graphite

We compute the interlayer bonding properties of graphite using an ab initio many-body theory. We
carry out variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo calculations and find an equilibrium interlayer
binding energy in good agreement with most recent experiments. We also analyze the behavior of the total
energy as a function of interlayer separation at large distances comparing the results with the predictions
of the random phase approximation.