A discrete Hubbard-Stratonovich decomposition for general, fermionic two-body interactions

Abstract A scheme is presented to decompose the exponential of a two-body operator in a discrete sum over exponentials of one-body operators. This discrete decomposition can be used instead of the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation in auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo methods. As an illustration, the decomposition is applied to the Hubbard model, where it is equivalent to the discrete Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation introduced by Hirsch, and to the nuclear pairing Hamiltonian.