On a full Monte Carlo approach to quantum mechanics

The Monte Carlo approach to numerical problems has shown to be remarkably efficient in performing very large computational tasks since it is an embarrassingly parallel technique. Additionally, Monte Carlo methods are well known to keep performance and accuracy with the increase of dimensionality of a given problem, a rather counterintuitive peculiarity not shared by any known deterministic method. Motivated by these very peculiar and desirable computational features, in this work we depict a full Monte Carlo approach to the problem of simulating single- and many-body quantum systems by means of signed particles. In particular we introduce a stochastic technique, based on the strategy known as importance sampling, for the computation of the Wigner kernel which, so far, has represented the main bottleneck of this method (it is equivalent to the calculation of a multi-dimensional integral, a problem in which complexity is known to grow exponentially with the dimensions of the problem). The introduction of this stochastic technique for the kernel is twofold: firstly it reduces the complexity of a quantum many-body simulation from non-linear to linear, secondly it introduces an embarassingly parallel approach to this very demanding problem. To conclude, we perform concise but indicative numerical experiments which clearly illustrate how a full Monte Carlo approach to many-body quantum systems is not only possible but also advantageous. This paves the way towards practical time-dependent, first-principle simulations of relatively large quantum systems by means of affordable computational resources. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.