Equilibrium Microcanonical Annealing for First-Order Phase Transitions

A framework is presented for carrying out simulations of equilibrium systems in the microcanonical ensemble using annealing in an energy ceiling. The framework encompasses an equilibrium version of simulated annealing, population annealing and hybrid algorithms that interpolate between these extremes. These equilibrium, microcanonical annealing algorithms are applied to the thermal first-order transition in the 20-state, two-dimensional Potts model. All of these algorithms are observed to perform well at the first-order transition though for the system sizes studied here, equilibrium simulated annealing is most efficient.