Nonequilibrium relaxation analysis for first-order phase transitions

The nonequilibrium relaxation method is applied to first-order transition systems. Using the mixed-phase initialization, one can avoid the influence of the meta-stable states and the hysteresis phenomenon in the simulation. The transition point is estimated accurately on very large lattices. To check the validity and efficiency of the method, we apply it to the ferromagnetic Potts model with q=20 and 5 in two dimensions together with a demonstration of hysteresis phenomenon in the standard initializations.