Critical behavior of hard-core lattice gases: Wang-Landau sampling with adaptive windows

Critical properties of lattice gases with nearest-neighbor exclusion are investigated via adaptive-window Wang-Landau sampling (WLS) on the square and simple cubic lattices, for which the model is known to exhibit an Ising-like phase transition. We study the particle density, order parameter, compressibility, Binder cumulant and susceptibility, in efforts to test WLS, which has been used quite widely in recent years, in the context of lattice gases. Of considerable interest is whether it is possible to estimate critical exponents reliably using WLS with adaptive windows. We find that the method yields results in fair agreement with exact values (in two dimensions) and numerical estimates (in three dimensions). (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.