We investigate methodological issues concerning the direct coexistence method, an
increasingly popular approach to evaluate the solid-fluid coexistence by means of computer
simulations. The first issue is the impact of the simulation ensemble on the results. We
compare the NpT ensemble (easy to use but approximate) with the Np z T ensemble
(rigorous but more difficult to handle). Our work shows that both ensembles yield similar
results for large systems (> 5000 particles). Another issue, which is usually disregarded, is …