The energy variance extrapolation method consists in relating the approximate energies in many-body calculations to the corresponding energy variances and inferring eigenvalues by extrapolating to zero variance. The method needs a fast evaluation of
the energy variances. For many-body methods that expand the nuclear wave functions in terms of deformed Slater determinants, the best available method for the evaluation of energy variances scales with the sixth power of the number of single-particle states. We propose a new method which depends on the number of single-particle orbits and the number of particles rather than the number of single-particle states. We discuss as an example the case of ${}^4He$ using the chiral N3LO interaction in a basis consisting up to 184 single-particle states.
A simple and general prescription for evaluating unambiguously the sign of the grand-canonical trace of quasi-particle statistical density operators (the so-called sign ambiguity in taking the square root of determinants) is given. Sign ambiguities o
f this kind appear in the evaluation of the grand-canonical partition function projected to good quantum numbers (angular momentum, parity and particle number) in the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approximation at finite temperature, since traces are usually expressed as the square root of determinants. A comparison is made with the numerical continuity method.
