@Article{CiCP-24-383,
author = {Rene Haber and Karl Heinz Hoffmann},
title = {A Performance Comparison of Density-of-States Methods},
journal = {Communications in Computational Physics},
year = {2018},
volume = {24},
number = {2},
pages = {383--407},
abstract = {<p style="text-align: justify;">Nowadays equilibrium thermodynamic properties of materials can be obtained very efficiently by numerical simulations. If the properties are needed over a
range of temperatures it is highly efficient to determine the density of states first. For
this purpose histogram- and matrix-based methods have been developed. Here we
present a performance comparison of a number of those algorithms. The comparison
is based on three different benchmarks, which cover systems with discrete and continuous state spaces. For the benchmarks the exact density of states is known, for one
benchmark – the FAB system – the exact infinite temperature transition matrix Q is also
known. In particular the Wang-Landau algorithm in its standard and 1/t variant are
compared to Q-methods, where estimates of the infinite temperature transition matrix
are obtained by random walks with different acceptance criteria. Overall the Q-matrix
methods perform better or at least as good as the histogram methods. In addition, different methods to obtain the density of states from the Q-matrix and their efficiencies
are presented.</p>},
issn = {1991-7120},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.4208/cicp.OA-2017-0058},
url = {http://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/cicp/12245.html}
}