please can you help me?

Recently, this problem came up in one of my pet projects:

Does anybody know the current state-of-the-art if one needs to distinguish a weak 1st order phase transition from a 2nd order transition with lattice simulations?

If you have an opinion please please let me know and leave a comment.





added later: It might help if I explain a little bit better what I am talking about.



In my pet project I am doing Metropolis simulations on a 4d lattice and the size is limited so that 32^4 is already 'very large'.

Of course, finite size scaling is an important tool, but I would like to know e.g. if it is still state-of-the-art to use the Binder cumulant, or if there are better ways to do this.



Also, one can try to directly identify meta-stable states, but what is the best technique to do so? I know that e.g. simple histograms were sub-standard already ten years ago.

I am also curious if people use partition function zeros in real problems and if something like this has become a standard tool in recent years.



I would appreciate any input e.g. pointers to articles or books that may be relevant. Please do not hesitate to post a comment (which you can do as anonymous).