Fast Solvers for Dense Linear Systems

It appears that large scale calculations in particle physics often require to solve systems of linear equations with rational number coefficients exactly. If classical Gaussian elimination is applied to a dense system, the time needed to solve such a system grows exponentially in the size of the system. In this tutorial paper, we present a standard technique from computer algebra that avoids this exponential growth: homomorphic images. Using this technique, big dense linear systems can be solved in a much more reasonable time than using Gaussian elimination over the rationals.