Quantum Monte Carlo simulations, while being efficient for bosons, suffer from the “negative sign problem” when applied to fermions—causing an exponential increase of the computing time with the number of particles. A polynomial time solution to the sign problem is highly desired since it would provide an unbiased and numerically exact method to simulate correlated quantum systems. Here we show that such a solution is almost certainly unattainable by proving that the sign problem is nondeterministic polynomial (NP) hard, implying that a generic solution of the sign problem would also solve all problems in the complexity class NP in polynomial time.

• Received 11 August 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.170201