Simulating thermal boundary conditions of spin–lattice models with weighted averages

Abstract

Thermal boundary conditions have played an increasingly important role in revealing the nature of short-range spin glasses and is likely to be relevant also for other disordered systems. Diffusion method initializing each replica with a random boundary condition at the infinite temperature using population annealing has been used in recent large-scale simulations. However, the efficiency of this method can be greatly suppressed because of temperature chaos. For example, most samples have some boundary conditions that are completely eliminated from the population in the process of annealing at low temperatures. In this work, I study a weighted average method to solve this problem by simulating each boundary conditions separately and collect data using weighted averages. The efficiency of the two methods is studied using both population annealing and parallel tempering, showing that the weighted average method is more efficient and accurate.