Abstract
We suggest an exact approach to help remedy the fermion sign problem in diffusion quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The approach is based on an explicit suppression of symmetric modes in the Schrödinger equation by means of a modified stochastic diffusion process (antisymmetric diffusion process). We introduce this algorithm and illustrate it on potential models in one dimension (1D) and show that there it solves the fermion sign problem exactly and converges to the lowest antisymmetric state of the system. Then, we discuss extensions of this approach to many-dimensional systems on examples of quantum oscillator in 2D–20D and a toy model of three and four fermions on harmonic strings in 2D and 3D. We show that in all these cases our method shows a performance comparable to that of a fixed-node approximation with an exact node.
- Received 15 March 2005
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.73.026706
©2006 American Physical Society