Determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC), formulated in complex-fermion representation, has played a key role in studying strongly-correlated fermion systems. However, its applicability is limited due to the requirement of particle-number conservation after Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation. In going beyond the conventional DQMC, one encouraging development occurred when Majorana fermions were introduced for QMC [1,2]. But in previous Majorana-based QMC, Boltzmann weight is determined often with a sign ambiguity. Here we successfully resolved this ambiguity by deriving a closed-form Pfaffian formula for the weight, enabling efficient calculation of the weight with its sign in polynomial time. We call it ''Pfaffian quantum Monte Carlo'' (PfQMC), which can be applied to generic interacting fermion models. We have successfully employed PfQMC to explore how robust Majorana edge modes in Kitaev chain are against strong interactions. By offering greater flexibility, PfQMC can potentially enhance existing sign-mitigating and approximation methods and help address challenging issues such as the ground-state properties of the doped Hubbard model.
In the situation of two electrostatically coupled conductors, a current in one conductor may induce a current in the other one. We will study this phenomenon, called Coulomb drag, in the Hubbard chain where the two 'conductors' are given by fermions with different spin orientations. With the aid of a Monte Carlo approach, which we presented in a recent paper, we calculate the trans-conductance in different variants of the Hubbard chain (with/without impurity and additional (long-ranged) interactions) for different fillings.
We consider the effect of the coupling between two-dimensional (2D) quantum rotors near an XY ferromagnetic quantum critical point and spins of itinerant fermions. We analyze how this coupling affects the dynamics of rotors and the self-energy of fermions. A common belief is that near a
q=0 ferromagnetic transition, fermions induce an $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}/q$ Landau damping of rotors (i.e., the dynamical critical exponent is
z=3) and Landau overdamped rotors give rise to non-Fermi liquid fermionic self-energy $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}\ensuremath{\propto}{\ensuremath{\omega}}^{2/3}$. This behavior has been confirmed in previous quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) studies. Here we show that for the XY case the behavior is different. We report the results of large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations, which show that at small frequencies
z=2 and $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}\ensuremath{\propto}{\ensuremath{\omega}}^{1/2}$. We argue that the new behavior is associated with the fact that a fermionic spin is by itself not a conserved quantity due to spin-spin coupling to rotors, and a combination of self-energy and vertex corrections replaces
1/q in the Landau damping by a constant. We discuss the implication of these results to experiments.