Towards an effective importance sampling in Monte Carlo simulations of a system with a complex action

Abstract

The sign problem is a notorious problem, which occurs in Monte Carlo simulations of a system with a partition function whose integrand is not positive. One way to simulate such a system is to use the factorization method where one enforces sampling in the part of the configuration space which gives important contribution to the partition function. This is accomplished by using constraints on some observables chosen appropriately and minimizing the free energy associated with their joint distribution functions. These observables are maximally correlated with the complex phase. Observables not in this set essentially decouple from the phase and can be calculated without the sign problem in the corresponding “microcanonical” ensemble. These ideas are applied on a simple matrix model with very strong sign problem and the results are found to be consistent with analytic calculations using the Gaussian Expansion Method.