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

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.