English

Complex Langevin and boundary terms

High Energy Physics - Lattice 2019-01-30 v4 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

As is well known the Complex Langevin (CL) method sometimes fails to converge or converges to the wrong limit. We identified one reason for this long ago: insufficient decay of the probability density either near infinity or near poles of the drift, leading to boundary terms that spoil the formal argument for correctness. To gain a deeper understanding of this phenomenon, we analyze the emergence of such boundary terms thoroughly in a simple model, where analytic results can be compared with numerics. We also show how some simple modification stabilizes the CL process in such a way that it can produce results agreeing with direct integration. Besides explicitly demonstrating the connection between boundary terms and correct convergence our analysis also suggests a correctness criterion which could be applied in realistic lattice simulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.05187,
  title  = {Complex Langevin and boundary terms},
  author = {Manuel Scherzer and Erhard Seiler and Dénes Sexty and Ion-Olimpiu Stamatescu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.05187},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

15 pages, 13 figures v2: changed format to two columns for journal submission, added references and a few comments on an old criterion for correctness v3: Added some plots and discussion on the criterion from citation [13]

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:34:52.907Z