Constrained Path Quantum Monte Carlo Method for Fermion Ground States

We propose a new quantum Monte Carlo algorithm to compute fermion ground-state properties. The ground state is projected from an initial wave function by a branching random walk in an over-complete basis space of Slater determinants. By constraining the determinants according to a trial wave function |ₓ〉, we remove the exponential decay of signal-to-noise ratio characteristic of the sign problem. The method is variational and is exact if |ₓ〉 is exact. We report results on the two-dimensional Hubbard model up to size 1616, for various electron fillings and interaction strengths.