A new simulation approach to the freezing transition

The task of accurately locating fluid-crystal phase boundaries by computer simulation is hampered by problems associated with traversing mixed-phase states. We describe a recently introduced Monte Carlo (MC) method that circumvents this problem by implementing a global coordinate transformation (“phase switch”) which takes the system from one pure phase to the other in a single MC step. The method is potentially quite general. We illustrate it by application to the freezing of hard spheres.