Few-body physics on a spacetime lattice in the worldline approach

We formulate the physics of two species of nonrelativistic hard-core bosons with attractive or repulsive delta function interactions on a spacetime lattice in the worldline approach. We show that worm algorithms can efficiently sample the worldline configurations in any fixed particle-number sector if the chemical potential is tuned carefully. Since fermions can be treated as hard-core bosons up to a permutation sign, we apply this approach to study nonrelativistic fermions. The fermion permutation sign is an observable in this approach and can be used to extract energies in each particle-number sector. In one dimension, nonrelativistic fermions can only permute across boundaries, and so our approach does not suffer from sign problems in many cases, unlike the auxiliary field method. Using our approach, we discover limitations of the recently proposed complex Langevin calculations in one spatial dimension for some parameter regimes. In higher dimensions, our method suffers from the usual fermion sign problem. Here we provide evidence that it may be possible to alleviate this problem for few-body physics.