Résumé
p. 153-166 in ``Computer Simulation Studies in Condensed Matter
Physics XIII''; Ed. D.P. Landau, S.P Lewis, and H.B. Schuttler (Springer,
Berlin, 2000) We discuss the efficiency of the so-called parallel tempering method to
equilibrate glassy systems also at low temperatures. The main focus is on two
structural glass models, SiO_2 and a Lennard-Jones system, but we also
investigate a fully connected 10 state Potts-glass. By calculating the mean
squared displacement of a tagged particle and the spin-autocorrelation
function, we find that for these three glass-formers the parallel tempering
method is indeed able to generate, at low temperatures, new independent
configurations at a rate which is O(100) times faster than more traditional
algorithms, such as molecular dynamics and single spin flip Monte Carlo
dynamics. In addition we find that this speedup increases with decreasing
temperature. The reliability of the results is checked by calculating the
distribution of the energy at various temperatures and by showing that these
can be mapped onto each other by the reweighting technique.