Multicanonical analysis of the plaquette-only gonihedric Ising model and its dual

The three-dimensional purely plaquette gonihedric Ising model and its dual are investigated to resolve inconsistencies in the literature for the values of the inverse transition temperature of the very strong temperature-driven first-order phase transition that is apparent in the system. Multicanonical simulations of this model allow us to measure system configurations that are suppressed by more than 60 orders of magnitude compared to probable states. With the resulting high-precision data, we find excellent agreement with our recently proposed nonstandard finite-size scaling laws for models with a macroscopic degeneracy of the low-temperature phase by challenging the prefactors numerically. We find an overall consistent inverse transition temperature of β ∞ = 0.551334(8) from the simulations of the original model both with periodic and fixed boundary conditions, and the dual model with periodic boundary conditions. For the original model with periodic boundary conditions, we obtain the first reliable estimate of the interface tension σ = 0.12037(18), using the statistics of suppressed configurations. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license