2025/02/20 by Jaakko Hällfors, Hällfors, Jaakko, Kari Rummukainen +1 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #nanoparticles nucleation surface interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.14610
openalex publication_date 2025/02/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In the absence of impurities and boundary effects, first order phase transitions are initiated by the nucleation of critical bubbles. In thermally driven transitions many systems can remain metastable for an extended time, possibly tens of orders of magnitude longer than typical microscopic timescales. In standard Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations of these systems the probability of critical bubbles can be too suppressed for the transition to happen in any practical simulation time. The computation can be accelerated by using modified sampling methods, for example multicanonical or Wang-Landau sampling. However, even using these methods, there remains a condensation barrier which dramatically reduces the efficiency at large volumes. We present a novel sampling method, the method of expanded ensembles, which very effectively circumvents the condensation barrier and enables efficient simulations at large volumes.