No Arabic abstract
Recently there has been remarkable progress in the complex Langevin method, which aims at solving the complex action problem by complexifying the dynamical variables in the original path integral. In particular, a new technique called the gauge cooling was introduced and the full QCD simulation at finite density has been made possible in the high temperature (deconfined) phase or with heavy quarks. Here we provide a rigorous justification of the complex Langevin method including the gauge cooling procedure. We first show that the gauge cooling can be formulated as an extra term in the complex Langevin equation involving a gauge transformation parameter, which is chosen appropriately as a function of the configuration before cooling. The probability distribution of the complexified dynamical variables is modified by this extra term. However, this modification is shown not to affect the Fokker-Planck equation for the corresponding complex weight as far as observables are restricted to gauge invariant ones. Thus we demonstrate explicitly that the gauge cooling can be used as a viable technique to satisfy the convergence conditions for the complex Langevin method. We also discuss the gauge cooling in 0-dimensional systems such as vector models or matrix models.
The complex Langevin method aims at performing path integral with a complex action numerically based on complexification of the original real dynamical variables. One of the poorly understood issues concerns occasional failure in the presence of logarithmic singularities in the action, which appear, for instance, from the fermion determinant in finite density QCD. We point out that the failure should be attributed to the breakdown of the relation between the complex weight that satisfies the Fokker-Planck equation and the probability distribution associated with the stochastic process. In fact, this problem can occur in general when the stochastic process involves a singular drift term. We show, however, in a simple example that there exists a parameter region in which the method works although the standard reweighting method is hardly applicable.
We study the gauge cooling technique for the complex Langevin method applied to the computation in lattice quantum chromodynamics. We propose a new solver of the minimization problem that optimizes the gauge, which does not include any parameter in each iteration, and shows better performance than the classical gradient descent method especially when the lattice size is large. Two numerical tests are carried out to show the effectiveness of the new algorithm.
Recently there has been remarkable progress in solving the sign problem, which occurs in investigating statistical systems with a complex weight. The two promising methods, the complex Langevin method and the Lefschetz thimble method, share the idea of complexifying the dynamical variables, but their relationship has not been clear. Here we propose a unified formulation, in which the sign problem is taken care of by both the Langevin dynamics and the holomorphic gradient flow. We apply our formulation to a simple model in three different ways and show that one of them interpolates the two methods by changing the flow time.
We study perturbations that break gauge symmetries in lattice gauge theories. As a paradigmatic model, we consider the three-dimensional Abelian-Higgs (AH) model with an N-component scalar field and a noncompact gauge field, which is invariant under U(1) gauge and SU(N) transformations. We consider gauge-symmetry breaking perturbations that are quadratic in the gauge field, such as a photon mass term, and determine their effect on the critical behavior of the gauge-invariant model, focusing mainly on the continuous transitions associated with the charged fixed point of the AH field theory. We discuss their relevance and compute the (gauge-dependent) exponents that parametrize the departure from the critical behavior (continuum limit) of the gauge-invariant model. We also address the critical behavior of lattice AH models with broken gauge symmetry, showing an effective enlargement of the global symmetry, from U(N) to O(2N), which reflects a peculiar cyclic renormalization-group flow in the space of the lattice AH parameters and of the photon mass.
In recent years, there has been remarkable progress in theoretical justification of the complex Langevin method, which is a promising method for evading the sign problem in the path integral with a complex weight. There still remains, however, an issue concerning occasional failure of this method in the case where the action involves logarithmic singularities such as the one appearing from the fermion determinant in finite density QCD. In this talk, we point out that this failure is due to the breakdown of the relation between the complex weight which satisfies the Fokker-Planck equation and the probability distribution generated by the stochastic process. In fact, this kind of failure can occur in general when the stochastic process involves a singular drift term. We show, however, in simple examples, that there exists a parameter region in which the method works although the standard reweighting method is hardly applicable.