Zierenberg Johannes, Janke Wolfhard
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Leipzig, Postfach 100 920, D-04009 Leipzig, Germany.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2015 Jul;92(1):012134. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.92.012134. Epub 2015 Jul 27.
We present a finite-size scaling analysis of the droplet condensation-evaporation transition of a lattice gas (in two and three dimensions) and a Lennard-Jones gas (in three dimensions) at fixed density. Parallel multicanonical simulations allow sampling of the required system sizes with precise equilibrium estimates. In the limit of large systems, we verify the theoretical leading-order scaling prediction for both the transition temperature and the finite-size rounding. In addition, we present an emerging intermediate scaling regime, consistent in all considered cases and with similar recent observations for polymer aggregation. While the intermediate regime locally may show a different effective scaling, we show that it is a gradual crossover to the large-system scaling behavior by including empirical higher-order corrections. This implies that care has to be taken when considering scaling ranges, possibly leading to completely wrong predictions for the thermodynamic limit. In this study, we consider a crossing of the phase boundary orthogonal to the usual fixed temperature studies. We show that this is an equivalent approach and, under certain conditions, may show smaller finite-size corrections.