Nuclear Physics B251[FS13] (1985) 311-332 © North-Holland Publishing Company FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR THE FIRST-ORDER NATURE OF THE PURE GAUGE SU(3) DECONFINEMENT TRANSITION J. KOGUT, J. POLONYI* and H.W. WYLD Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA J. SHIGEMITSU Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA D.K. SINCLAIR Department of Physics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 43221, USA Received 26 June 1984 The presence of metastable states near the SU(3) deconfinement transition is verified using both microcanonical and Monte Carlo simulation methods. I. Introduction The microcanonical ensemble method [1, 2] for numerically solving lattice gauge theories has been suggested as a worthwhile and complementary alternative to Monte Carlo simulations. The method has been generalized to cover theories with ferrnions [3] and is one of the more practical approaches on the market today for investigating gauge theories with dynamical quarks. Very important issues, such as the fate of the finite temperature deconfinement transition in QCD or realistic hadron spectrum calculations which correctly probe anomaly physics, are currently under study using this method. Preliminary results have been reported in ref. [4]. In the present article, however, we describe further tests of the microcanonical method in the pure SU(3) gauge theory. We believe that it is important to understand this new approach in situations where results using other techniques are available. In addition we will see that even in the pure gauge theory, certain questions, such as the order of a phase transition, are better suited to a microcanonical analysis than to Monte Carlo investigations. * On leave from the Central Research Institute for Physics, Budapest, Hungary. 311