Effective hamiltonian approach and the lattice fixed node approximation.

We define a numerical scheme that allows to approximate a given Hamiltonian by an effective one, by requiring several constraints determined by exact properties of generic “short range” Hamiltonians. In this way the standard lattice fixed node is also improved as far as the variational energy is concerned. The effective Hamiltonian is defined in terms of a guiding function ψG and can be solved exactly by Quantum Monte Carlo methods. We argue that, for reasonable ψG and away from phase transitions, the long distance, low energy properties are rather independent on the chosen guiding function, thus allowing to remove the well known problem of standard variational Monte Carlo schemes based only on total energy minimizations, and therefore insensitive to long distance low energy properties. © 2003 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]