Speeding up Monte Carlo simulation of patchy hard cylinders

. The hard cylinder model decorated with attractive patches proved to be very useful recently in studying physical properties of several colloidal systems. Phase diagram, elastic constants and cholesteric properties obtained from computer simulations based on a simple hard cylinder model have been all successfully and quantitatively compared to experimental results. Key to these simulations is an efficient algorithm to check the overlap between hard cylinders. Here, we propose two algorithms to check the hard cylinder overlap and we assess their efficiency through a comparison with an existing method available in the literature and with the well-established algorithm for simulating hard spherocylinders. In addition, we discuss a couple of optimizations for performing computer simulations of patchy anisotropic particles and we estimate the speed-up which they can provide in the case of patchy hard cylinders. Graphical abstract