General approach for studying first-order phase transitions at low temperatures.

By combining different ideas, a general and efficient protocol to deal with discontinuous phase transitions at low temperatures is proposed. For small T's, it is possible to derive a generic analytic expression for appropriate order parameters, whose coefficients are obtained from simple simulations. Once in such regimes simulations by standard algorithms are not reliable; an enhanced tempering method, the parallel tempering-accurate for small and intermediate system sizes with rather low computational cost-is used. Finally, from finite size analysis, one can obtain the thermodynamic limit. The procedure is illustrated for four distinct models, demonstrating its power, e.g., to locate coexistence lines and the phase density at the coexistence.