Parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations of spherical fixed-connectivity model for polymerized membranes

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Parallel Tempering Monte Carlo (PTMC) effectively simulates first order phase transitions in a spherical fixed-connectivity membrane model, showing stronger transitions than traditional methods and benefiting from parallel computation for efficiency.

Contribution

The study applies PTMC to large lattice simulations of membrane models, revealing stronger phase transition signals and confirming PTMC's effectiveness over conventional Monte Carlo techniques.

Findings

PTMC detects a stronger first order transition than MMC.

Results on small lattices agree with previous studies.

Parallel implementation with OpenMP accelerates simulations.

Abstract

We study the first order phase transition of the fixed-connectivity triangulated surface model using the Parallel Tempering Monte Carlo (PTMC) technique on relatively large lattices. From the PTMC results, we find that the transition is considerably stronger than the reported ones predicted by the conventional Metropolis MC (MMC) technique and the flat histogram MC technique. We also confirm that the results of the PTMC on relatively smaller lattices are in good agreement with those known results. This implies that the PTMC is successfully used to simulate the first order phase transitions. The parallel computation in the PTMC is implemented by OpenMP, where the speed of the PTMC on multi-core CPUs is considerably faster than that on the single-core CPUs.