No Arabic abstract
We study the performance of Monte Carlo simulations that sample a broad histogram in energy by determining the mean first-passage time to span the entire energy space of d-dimensional ferromagnetic Ising/Potts models. We first show that flat-histogram Monte Carlo methods with single-spin flip updates such as the Wang-Landau algorithm or the multicanonical method perform sub-optimally in comparison to an unbiased Markovian random walk in energy space. For the d=1,2,3 Ising model, the mean first-passage time tau scales with the number of spins N=L^d as tau propto N^2L^z. The critical exponent z is found to decrease as the dimensionality d is increased. In the mean-field limit of infinite dimensions we find that z vanishes up to logarithmic corrections. We then demonstrate how the slowdown characterized by z>0 for finite d can be overcome by two complementary approaches - cluster dynamics in connection with Wang-Landau sampling and the recently developed ensemble optimization technique. Both approaches are found to improve the random walk in energy space so that tau propto N^2 up to logarithmic corrections for the d=1 and d=2 Ising model.
The diagrammatic Monte Carlo (Diag-MC) method is a numerical technique which samples the entire diagrammatic series of the Greens function in quantum many-body systems. In this work, we incorporate the flat histogram principle in the diagrammatic Monte method and we term the improved version Flat Histogram Diagrammatic Monte Carlo method. We demonstrate the superiority of the method over the standard Diag-MC in extracting the long-imaginary-time behavior of the Greens function, without incorporating any a priori knowledge about this function, by applying the technique to the polaron problem
We examine the sources of error in the histogram reweighting method for Monte Carlo data analysis. We demonstrate that, in addition to the standard statistical error which has been studied elsewhere, there are two other sources of error, one arising through correlations in the reweighted samples, and one arising from the finite range of energies sampled by a simulation of finite length. We demonstrate that while the former correction is usually negligible by comparison with statistical fluctuations, the latter may not be, and give criteria for judging the range of validity of histogram extrapolations based on the size of this latter correction.
We present Tethered Monte Carlo, a simple, general purpose method of computing the effective potential of the order parameter (Helmholtz free energy). This formalism is based on a new statistical ensemble, closely related to the micromagnetic one, but with an extended configuration space (through Creutz-like demons). Canonical averages for arbitrary values of the external magnetic field are computed without additional simulations. The method is put to work in the two dimensional Ising model, where the existence of exact results enables us to perform high precision checks. A rather peculiar feature of our implementation, which employs a local Metropolis algorithm, is the total absence, within errors, of critical slowing down for magnetic observables. Indeed, high accuracy results are presented for lattices as large as L=1024.
The Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) method can yield the imaginary-time dependence of a correlation function $C(tau)$ of an operator $hat O$. The analytic continuation to real-time proceeds by means of a numerical inversion of these data to find the response function or spectral density $A(omega)$ corresponding to $hat O$. Such a technique is very sensitive to the statistical errors in $C(tau)$ especially for large values of $tau$, when we are interested in the low-energy excitations. In this paper, we find that if we use the flat histogram technique in the QMC method, in such a way to make the {it histogram of} $C(tau)$ flat, the results of the analytic continuation for low-energy excitations improve using the same amount of computational time. To demonstrate the idea we select an exactly soluble version of the single-hole motion in the $t-J$ model and the diagrammatic Monte Carlo technique.
In this work, we present a comparative study of the accuracy provided by the Wang-Landau sampling and the Broad Histogram method to estimate de density of states of the two dimensional Ising ferromagnet. The microcanonical averages used to describe the thermodynamic behaviour and to use the Broad Histogram method were obtained using the single spin-flip Wang-Landau sampling, attempting to convergence issues and accuracy improvements. We compare the results provided by both techniques with the exact ones for thermodynamic properties and critical exponents. Our results, within the Wang-Landau sampling, reveal that the Broad Histogram approach provides a better description of the density of states for all cases analysed.