https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2016-60389-4
Regular Article
Exploring first-order phase transitions with population annealing*
1 Science Center in Chernogolovka, 142432 Chernogolovka, Russia
2 Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, 142432 Chernogolovka, Russia
3 Applied Mathematics Research Centre, Coventry University, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK
4 National Research University Higher School of Economics, 101000 Moscow, Russia
5 Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Leipzig, Postfach 100 920, D-04009 Leipzig, Germany
a e-mail: martin.weigel@coventry.ac.uk
Received: 8 December 2016
Revised: 13 December 2016
Published online: 5 April 2017
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.
Supplementary material in the form of four mp4 and one pdf files available from the Journal web page at: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2016-60389-4
© EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag, 2017