Sign problems, noise, and chiral symmetry breaking in a QCD-like theory

Abstract

The Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model reduced to 2+1 dimensions has two different path integral formulations: at finite chemical potential one formulation has a severe sign problem similar to that found in QCD, while the other does not. At large N, where N is the number of flavors, one can compute the probability distributions of fermion correlators analytically in both formulations. In the former case one finds a broad distribution with small mean; in the latter one finds a heavy tailed positive distribution amenable to the cumulant expansion techniques developed in earlier work. We speculate on the implications of this model for QCD.

16 pages, 5 figures; Published version with minor changes from the original

References in corpus (2)

• Phase of the Fermion Determinant at Nonzero Chemical Potential
• The QCD Sign Problem for Small Chemical Potential

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Topological surface states in nodal superconductors
• Nuclear Reactions from Lattice QCD
• Subsets and the canonical partition functions
• Distribution of Canonical Determinants in QCD