Slave equations for spin models

We apply an accelerated Langevin algorithm to the simulation of continous spin models on the lattice. In conjunction with the evolution equation for the spins we use slave equations to compute estimators for the connected correlation functions of the model. In situations for which the symmetry of the model is sufficiently strongly broken by an external field these estimators work well and yield a signal-to-noise ratio for the Green function at large time separations more favourable than that resulting from the standard method. With the restoration of symmetry, however, the slave equation estimators exhibit an intrinsic instability associated with the growth of a power law tail in the probability distributions for the measured quantities. Once this tail has grown sufficiently strong it results in a divergence of the variance of the estimator which then ceases to be useful for measurement purposes. The instability of the slave equation method in circumstances of weak symmetry breaking precludes its use in determining the mass gap in non-linear sigma models.