TheXY model and the three-state antiferromagnetic Potts model in three dimensions: Critical properties from fluctuating boundary conditions

We present the results of a Monte Carlo study of the three-dimensionalXY model and the three-dimensional antiferromagnetic three-state Potts model. In both cases we compute the difference of the free energies of a system with periodic and a system with antiperiodic boundary conditions in a neighborhood of the critical coupling. From the finite-size scaling behaviour of this quantity we extract values for the critical temperature and the critical exponentv that are compatible with recent high-statistics Monte Carlo studies of the models. The results for the free energy difference at the critical temperature and for the exponentv confirm that both models belong to the same universality class.