Fluctuations and reweighting of the quark determinant on large lattices

We propose to stabilise HMC simulations of lattice QCD with very light Wilson quarks by splitting the quark determinant into two factors and by treating the factor that includes the contribution of the low modes of the Dirac operator as a reweighting factor. In general, determinant reweighting becomes inefficient on large lattices, because the statistical fluctuations of quark determinants increase exponentially with the lattice volume. Random matrix theory and some numerical studies now suggest that the low-mode contribution to the determinant behaves differently, which allows factorisations to be devised that preserve the efficiency of the simulation on large lattices.