Multicanonical analysis of the plaquette-only gonihedric Ising model and its dual

TL;DR

This study uses multicanonical simulations to accurately analyze the first-order phase transition in the 3D plaquette gonihedric Ising model and its dual, resolving previous inconsistencies and confirming theoretical scaling laws.

Contribution

It provides the first high-precision estimates of the inverse transition temperature and interface tension for this model using advanced multicanonical methods.

Findings

Inverse transition temperature: 0.551334(8)

Interface tension: 0.12037(18)

Agreement with nonstandard finite-size scaling laws

Abstract

The three-dimensional purely plaquette gonihedric Ising model and its dual are investigated to resolve inconsistencies in the literature for the values of the inverse transition temperature of the very strong temperature-driven first-order phase transition that is apparent in the system. Multicanonical simulations of this model allow us to measure system configurations that are suppressed by more than 60 orders of magnitude compared to probable states. With the resulting high-precision data, we find excellent agreement with our recently proposed nonstandard finite-size scaling laws for models with a macroscopic degeneracy of the low-temperature phase by challenging the prefactors numerically. We find an overall consistent inverse transition temperature of 0.551334(8) from the simulations of the original model both with periodic and fixed boundary conditions, and the dual model with periodic boundary conditions. For the original model with periodic boundary conditions, we obtain the first reliable estimate of the interface tension, 0.12037(18), using the statistics of suppressed configurations.