Associated with the ground state of a quantum system, there is a unique stochastic process which, in general, has diffusion and jumping components. This is illustrated in two exact models. The drift and the jumping kernel of the ground-state process may be obtained directly without solving the Schrödinger equation. A method is proposed to extract expectation values and Euclidian correlation functions from a numerical simulation of the process. The method applies equally well to boson and fermion systems, without the sign problem.

• Received 29 October 1993

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.50.5035