Speaker
Philippe de Forcrand
(ETH Zurich & CERN)
Description
The 'sign problem', i.e. the presence of configurations with negative or complex weight in the partition sum, has been a technical obstacle of growing importance, which prevents the Monte Carlo study of many systems of physical interest, among them QCD in 'extreme' parameter regimes. I will recall some basic notions about the sign problem, and review current attempts to overcome it.