Autocorrelations in Hybrid Monte Carlo Simulations

Understand

Simulations of QCD suffer from severe critical slowing down towards the continuum limit.

• This problem is known to be prominent in the topological charge, however, all observables are affected to various degree by these slow modes in the Monte Carlo evolution.
• We investigate the slowing down in high statistics simulations and propose a new error analysis method, which gives a realistic estimate of the contribution of the slow modes to the errors.