Reduced critical slowing down for statistical physics simulations

Wang-Landau simulations offer the possibility to integrate explicitly over a collective coordinate and stochastically over the remainder of configuration space. We propose to choose the so-called “slow mode,” which is responsible for large autocorrelation times and thus critical slowing down, for collective integration. We study this proposal for the Ising model and the linear-log-relaxation (LLR) method as simulation algorithm. We first demonstrate supercritical slowing down in a phase with spontaneously broken symmetry and for the heat-bath algorithms, for which autocorrelation times grow exponentially with system size. By contrast, using the magnetization as collective coordinate, we present evidence that supercritical slowing down is absent. We still observe a polynomial increase of the autocorrelation time with volume (critical slowing down), which is, however, reduced by orders of magnitude when compared to local update techniques.