Four-dimensional domain decomposition for the factorization of the fermion determinant

The non-local dependence of the fermion determinant on the gauge field limits our ability of simulating Quantum Chromodynamics on the lattice. Here we present a factorization of the gauge field dependence of the fermion determinant based on an overlapping four-dimensional domain decomposition of the lattice. The resulting action is block-local in the gauge and in the auxiliary bosonic fields. Possible applications are multi-level integration, master field simulations, and more efficient parallelizations of Monte Carlo algorithms and codes.