Recent Advances in Monte Carlo Methods

An important challenge in understanding properties of strongly correlated quantum systems, is our inability to compute physical quantities even with the knowledge of the microscopic forces. This inability hinders a complete understanding of the system and makes it difficult to uncover new physics. The difficulty stems from the exponentially large number of computations in the system size, that are required to compute a quantity from first principles. Unfortunately, the quantum nature of the problem does not easily yield to a classical description, which may be amenable to Monte Carlo methods. Over the past decade, a new class of quantum Monte Carlo methods have emerged based on diagrammatic techniques, that were developed originally for perturbative calculations. Many calculations that seemed
impossible earlier have been accomplished with the new approach. The goal of the proposed workshop is to explore the full potential of these new diagrammatic Monte Carlo methods. In particular we plan to explore applications to finite density lattice field theories, nuclear effectice field theories, and strongly coupled fermion systems.