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An outstanding problem in the simulation of condensed-matter phenomena is how to obtain dynamical information. We consider the numerical analytic continuation of imaginary-time quantum Monte Carlo data to obtain real-frequency spectral functions. This is an extremely ill-posed problem similar to the inversion of a Laplace transform. We suggest an image-reconstruction approach, which has been widely applied to data analysis in experimental research. Specifically, we apply the maximum-entropy method (ME) to the analytic continuation of quantum Monte Carlo data. We report encouraging preliminary results for the Fano-Anderson model of an impurity state in a continuum. The incorporation of additional prior information, such as sum rules and asymptotic behavior, can be expected to significantly improve results. We compare (ME) to alternative methods. We also discuss statistical error propagation for the analytic continuation problem via the likelihood function, which is independent of the choice of image-reconstruction method. This includes the sensitivity of the data to structure in the spectral function, the optimization of Monte Carlo simulations, and how to incorporate covariance in the statistical errors of the Monte Carlo method.
Silver et al. (1990) studied this question.