A Constrained Path Quantum Monte Carlo Method for Fermion Ground States

Abstract

We propose a new quantum Monte Carlo algorithm to compute fermion ground-state properties. The ground state is projected from an initial wavefunction by a branching random walk in an over-complete basis space of Slater determinants. By constraining the determinants according to a trial wavefunction $|Ψ_T \rangle$, we remove the exponential decay of signal-to-noise ratio characteristic of the sign problem. The method is variational and is exact if $|Ψ_T\rangle$ is exact. We report results on the two-dimensional Hubbard model up to size $16\times 16$, for various electron fillings and interaction strengths.