Continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo (original) (raw)

In computational solid state physics, Continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo (CT-QMC) is a family of stochastic algorithms for solving the Anderson impurity model at finite temperature. These methods first expand the full partition function as a series of Feynman diagrams, employ Wick's theorem to group diagrams into determinants, and finally use Markov chain Monte Carlo to stochastically sum up the resulting series. The attribute continuous-time was introduced to distinguish the method from the then-predominant method, which relies on a Suzuki–Trotter discretisation of the imaginary time axis.