We report an essential improvement of the plain Fourier Monte Carlo algorithm that promises to be a powerful tool for investigating critical behavior in a large class of lattice models, in particular those containing microscopic or effective long-ranged interactions. On tuning the Monte Carlo acceptance rates separately for each wave vector, we are able to drastically reduce critical slowing down. We illustrate the resulting efficiency and unprecedented accuracy of our algorithm with a calculation of the universal elastic properties of crystalline membranes in the flat phase and derive a numerical estimate $\eta =0.795\left(10\right)$ for the critical exponent $\eta$ that challenges those derived from other recent simulations. The large system sizes accessible to our present algorithm also allow us to demonstrate that insufficiently taking into account corrections to scaling may severely hamper a finite size scaling analysis. This observation may also help to clarify the apparent disagreement of published numerical estimates of $\eta$ in the existing literature.

• Received 27 October 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.87.104112