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Auxiliary-field Monte Carlo is a method that allows the calculation, by use of Monte Carlo techniques, of averages of operators in many-body quantum mechanical (Blankenbecler 1981, Ceperley 1977) or classical problems (Baeurle 2004, Baeurle 2003, Baeurle 2002a).
The distinctive ingredient of "auxiliary-field Monte Carlo" is the fact that the interactions are decoupled by means of the application of the Hubbard–Stratonovich transformation, which permits the reformulation of many-body theory in terms of a scalar auxiliary-field representation. This reduces the many-body problem to the calculation of a sum or integral over all possible auxiliary-field configurations. In this sense, there is a trade-off: instead of dealing with one very complicated many-body problem, one faces the calculation of an infinite number of simple external-field problems.
It is here, as in other related methods, that Monte Carlo enters the game in the guise of importance sampling: the large sum over auxiliary-field configurations is performed by sampling over the most important ones, with a certain probability. In classical statistical physics, this probability is usually given by the (positive semi-definite) Boltzmann factor. Similar factors arise also in quantum field theories; however, these can have indefinite sign (especially in the case of Fermions) or even be complex-valued, which precludes their direct interpretation as probabilities. In these cases, one has to resort to a reweighting procedure (i.e., interpret the absolute value as probability and multiply the sign or phase to the observable) to get a strictly positive reference distribution suitable for Monte Carlo sampling. However, it is well known that, in specific parameter ranges of the model under consideration, the oscillatory nature of the weight function can lead to a bad statistical convergence of the numerical integration procedure. The problem is known as the numerical sign problem and can be alleviated with analytical and numerical convergence acceleration procedures (Baeurle 2002, Baeurle 2003a).
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Fermi liquid theory is a theoretical model of interacting fermions that describes the normal state of most metals at sufficiently low temperatures. The interactions among the particles of the many-body system do not need to be small. The phenomenological theory of Fermi liquids was introduced by the Soviet physicist Lev Davidovich Landau in 1956, and later developed by Alexei Abrikosov and Isaak Khalatnikov using diagrammatic perturbation theory. The theory explains why some of the properties of an interacting fermion system are very similar to those of the ideal Fermi gas, and why other properties differ.
In physics, lattice gauge theory is the study of gauge theories on a spacetime that has been discretized into a lattice.
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David Matthew Ceperley is a theoretical physicist in the physics department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UIUC. He is a world expert in the area of Quantum Monte Carlo computations, a method of calculation that is generally recognised to provide accurate quantitative results for many-body problems described by quantum mechanics.
The following timeline starts with the invention of the modern computer in the late interwar period.
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Ali Alavi FRS is a professor of theoretical chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.
In computational solid state physics, Continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo (CT-QMC) is a family of stochastic algorithms for solving the Anderson impurity model at finite temperature. These methods first expand the full partition function as a series of Feynman diagrams, employ Wick's theorem to group diagrams into determinants, and finally use Markov chain Monte Carlo to stochastically sum up the resulting series.
In many-body physics, the problem of analytic continuation is that of numerically extracting the spectral density of a Green function given its values on the imaginary axis. It is a necessary post-processing step for calculating dynamical properties of physical systems from quantum Monte Carlo simulations, which often compute Green function values only at imaginary-times or Matsubara frequencies.
Shang-keng Ma was a Chinese theoretical physicist, known for his work on the theory of critical phenomena and random systems. He is known as the co-author with Bertrand Halperin and Pierre Hohenberg of a 1972 paper that "generalized the renormalization group theory to dynamical critical phenomena." Ma is also known as the co-author with Yoseph Imry of a 1975 paper and with Amnon Aharony and Imry of a 1976 paper that established the foundation of the random field Ising model (RFIM)