Listening to Noise

TL;DR

This paper explores how sign problems cause heavy-tailed distributions in many-body system simulations and introduces a new statistical method to accurately extract ground state energies, demonstrated through toy models and lattice data.

Contribution

It proposes an alternative statistical approach to address sign problems in many-body simulations, improving energy extraction accuracy.

Findings

Heavy-tailed correlator distributions are linked to sign problems.

The new method effectively extracts ground state energies from challenging data.

Validated approach with toy models and lattice QCD data.

Abstract

We show how sign problems in simulations of many-body systems can manifest themselves in the form of heavy-tailed correlator distributions, similar to what is seen in electron propagation through disordered media. We propose an alternative statistical approach for extracting ground state energies in such systems, illustrating the method with a toy model and with lattice data for unitary fermions and for baryons in QCD.