Lanczos, the transfer matrix, and the signal-to-noise problem

Abstract

This work introduces a method for determining the energy spectrum of lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) by applying the Lanczos algorithm to the transfer matrix and using a bootstrap generalization of the Cullum-Willoughby method to filter out spurious eigenvalues. Proof-of-principle analyses of the simple harmonic oscillator and the LQCD proton mass demonstrate that this method provides faster ground-state convergence than the "effective mass," which is related to the power-iteration algorithm. Lanczos provides more accurate energy estimates than multi-state fits to correlation functions with small imaginary times while achieving comparable statistical precision. Two-sided error bounds are computed for Lanczos results and guarantee that excited-state effects cannot shift Lanczos results far outside their statistical uncertainties.

Comments: Journal version. Added ancillary correlation function data and Mathematica notebook to reproduce analysis and plots