Physics Letters B 781 (2018) 688–693
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
Lefschetz thimbles in fermionic effective models with repulsive
vector-field
Yuto Mori
a,∗
, Kouji Kashiwa
b
, Akira Ohnishi
c
a
Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan
b
Fukuoka Institute of Technology, Wajiro, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan
c
Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
1 June 2017
Received
in revised form 5 April 2018
Accepted
9 April 2018
Available
online 17 April 2018
Editor:
J.-P. Blaizot
Keywords:
Sign
problem
Complex
action
We discuss two problems in complexified auxiliary fields in fermionic effective models, the auxiliary
sign problem associated with the repulsive vector-field and the choice of the cut for the scalar field
appearing from the logarithmic function. In the fermionic effective models with attractive scalar and
repulsive vector-type interaction, the auxiliary scalar and vector fields appear in the path integral after
the bosonization of fermion bilinears. When we make the path integral well-defined by the Wick rotation
of the vector field, the oscillating Boltzmann weight appears in the partition function. This “auxiliary” sign
problem can be solved by using the Lefschetz-thimble path-integral method, where the integration path
is constructed in the complex plane. Another serious obstacle in the numerical construction of Lefschetz
thimbles is caused by singular points and cuts induced by multivalued functions of the complexified
scalar field in the momentum integration. We propose a new prescription which fixes gradient flow
trajectories on the same Riemann sheet in the flow evolution by performing the momentum integration
in the complex domain.
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
The sign problem appearing in the path integral is a serious ob-
stacle
to perform precise nonperturbative computations in various
quantum systems: The Boltzmann weight in the partition function
oscillates and then it induces the serious cancellation to the nu-
merical
integration process. Particularly, the sign problem attracts
much more attention recently in the lattice simulation of Quan-
tum
Chromodynamics (QCD) at finite density. It is caused by the
combination of the gluon field ( A
μ
) and the real quark chemical
potential (μ) in the fermion determinant of the Boltzmann weight;
see Ref. [1]for a review.
Several
methods have been proposed to circumvent the sign
problem such as the multi-parameter reweighting method [2,3],
Taylor expansion method [4–6], the imaginary chemical potential
approach [7–9], the canonical approach [10–13] and so on. These
methods can be applied to nonzero μ, but we can not obtain reli-
able
results in the large μ region.
Recently,
two approaches for the lattice simulation have been
attracting much more attention; the complex Langevin method and
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
addresses: mori .yuto .47z @st .kyoto -u .ac .jp (Y. Mori), kashiwa @fit .ac .jp
(K. Kashiwa),
ohnishi @yukawa .kyoto -u .ac .jp (A. Ohnishi).
the Lefschetz-thimble path-integral method. The complex Langevin
method is based on the stochastic quantization [14–17], it does
not use the standard Monte-Carlo sampling, and thus it seems to
be free from the sign problem. However, this method sometimes
provides a wrong answer when there are singularities of the drift
term in the Langevin-time evolution [16,18]. By comparison, the
Lefschetz-thimble path-integral method [19–21]is based on the
Picard–Lefschetz theory for the complexified space in variables of
integral [22]and thus it is still in the framework of the usual path-
integral
formulation. With this method, we modify the integration
path from the original one to new one on which the complex
phase is constant and thus the cancellation is suppressed. Thus,
we can soften the difficulty of the sign problem.
In
effective models of the fundamental theory, one can some-
times
avoid the sign problem because of the simplification of
the Boltzmann weight. For example, in the standard Nambu–Jona-
Lasinio
(NJL) model, one of the low-energy effective models of
QCD, one can avoid the sign problem at finite μ due to the sim-
plified
fermion determinant. The Dirac operator of the NJL model
has the Cγ
5
hermiticity and its determinant is real, det{D
NJL
(μ)} =
[
det{D
NJL
(μ)}]
∗
, where C is the charge conjugation matrix. How-
ever,
the sign problem comes back, when the repulsive vector-
current
interaction is included in the NJL model and the auxiliary
vector field is Wick rotated to make the path integral well-defined.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2018.04.018
0370-2693/
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.