Meron-cluster simulation of a chiral phase transition with staggered fermions

We examine a (3 + 1)-dimensional model of staggered lattice fermions with a four-fermion interaction and Z(2) chiral symmetry using the Hamiltonian fo rmulation. This model cannot be simulated with standard fermion algorithms because those suffer from a very severe sign problem. We use a new fermion simulation technique - the meron-cluster algorithm - which solves the sign problem and leads to high-precision numerical data, We investigate the fini te temperature chiral phase transition and verify that it is in the univers ality class of the 3-d Ising model using finite-size scaling, (C) 2000 Else vier Science B.V. All rights reserved.