Multicanonical ensemble: A new approach to simulate first-order phase transitions

Relying on the recent 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 100×100. 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.