The distinctive ingredient of "auxiliary-field Monte Carlo" is the fact that the interactions are decoupled by means of the application of the Hubbard–Stratonovich transformation, which permits the reformulation of many-body theory in terms of a scalar auxiliary- field representation. This reduces the many-body problem to the calculation of a sum or integral over all possible auxiliary-field configurations. In this sense, there is a trade-off: instead of dealing with one very complicated many-body problem, one faces the calculation of an infinite number of simple external-field problems.