Abstract

Population annealing is a hybrid of sequential and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods geared towards the efficient parallel simulation of systems with complex free-energy landscapes. Systems with first-order phase transitions are among the problems in computational physics that are difficult to tackle with standard methods such as local-update simulations in the canonical ensemble, for example with the Metropolis algorithm. It is hence interesting to see whether such transitions can be more easily studied using population annealing. We report here our preliminary observations from population annealing runs for the two-dimensional Potts model with q > 4, where it undergoes a first-order transition.

Date

2017

Authors

Lev Yu Barash, Martin Weigel, Lev N Shchur, Wolfhard Janke

Journal

The European Physical Journal Special Topics

Volume

226

Issue

4

Pages

595-604

Publisher

Springer Berlin Heidelberg