Analysis of the Ill-Conditioning of the Discrete Inverse Laplace transform in Monte Carlo Simulations of Quantum Many-Body Systems

Abstract

Analytic continuation of imaginary-time quantum Monte Carlo data to real-frequency spectra requires the inversion of a severely ill-posed two-sided Laplace transform and arises naturally in quantum many-body calculations of dynamic properties. In this work, we distinguish the intrinsic ill-posedness of the continuous inverse two-sided Laplace problem from the conditioning of its finite-dimensional discretization. For equidistant sampling and reconstruction grids, we express the discrete problem via a diagonally scaled monomial Vandermonde matrix with exponentially distributed nodes. Imposing the physical detailed-balance symmetry transforms the discretization into a diagonally scaled Chebyshev-Vandermonde system. Exploiting these structures, we derive explicit lower and upper bounds on the condition numbers in terms of the physical and discretization parameters. For the unconstrained discretization, our bounds reveal super-exponential growth of the condition number with the reconstruction dimension, which cannot be removed by increasing the number of imaginary-time samples alone. Detailed-balance substantially improves the conditioning, especially in the practically relevant pre-asymptotic regime, although the asymptotic super-exponential dependence remains. In both cases, our bounds identify a low-dimensional regime in which the super-exponential contribution is suppressed and stable reconstruction remains feasible. These results provide a mathematical explanation for the effectiveness of low-dimensional spectral representations and detailed-balance in analytic continuation. While they do not remove the fundamental ill-posedness, they substantially mitigate the ill-conditioning of its finite-dimensional discretization, delay the onset of its catastrophic super-exponential growth and thereby enlarge the range of numerically accessible reconstructions.