General approach for studying first-order phase transitions at low temperatures

Abstract

By combining different ideas, a general and efficient protocol to deal with discontinuous phase transitions at low temperatures is proposed. For small $T$'s, it is possible to derive a generic analytic expression for appropriate order parameters, whose coefficients are obtained from simple simulations. Once in such regimes simulations by standard algorithms are not reliable, an enhanced tempering method, the parallel tempering -- accurate for small and intermediate system sizes with rather low computational cost -- is used. Finally, from finite size analysis, one can obtain the thermodynamic limit. The procedure is illustrated for four distinct models, demonstrating its power, e.g., to locate coexistence lines and the phases density at the coexistence.

5 pages

References in corpus (3)

• Comparing parallel and simulated tempering enhanced sampling algorithms at phase transition regimes
• Obtaining pressure versus concentration phase diagrams in spin systems from Monte Carlo simulations
• Electron Emission in Superfluid and Low-temperature Vapor Phase Helium

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Current fluctuations in nonequilibrium discontinuous phase transitions
• Finite-size scaling for discontinuous nonequilibrium phase transitions
• A minimal mechanism leading to discontinuous phase transitions for short-range systems with absorbing states
• Exploiting a semi-analytic approach to study first order phase transitions
• A comparative study of selected parallel tempering methods
• Determining efficient temperature sets for the simulated tempering method
• Thoroughly analysis of the phase diagram for the Bell-Lavis model: An entropic simulational study
• Equivalence between microcanonical methods for lattice models
• Efficient simulated tempering with approximated weights: Applications to first-order phase transitions