MULTICANONICAL ENSEMBLE - A NEW APPROACH TO SIMULATE 1ST-ORDER PHASE-TRANSITIONS

Relying on the recently proposed multicanonical algorithm, we present a numerical simulation of the first-order phase transition in the 2D 10-state Potts model on lattices up to sizes 100 x 100. It is demonstrated that the new algorithm lacks an exponentially fast increase of the tunneling time between metastable states as a function of the linear size L of the system. Instead, the tunneling time diverges approximately proportional to L 2.65. On our largest lattice we gain more than 2 orders of magnitude as compared to a standard heat-bath algorithm. As a first physical application we report a high-precision computation of the interfacial free energy per unit area.