  We consider the negative weight percolation (NWP) problem on hypercubic
lattice graphs with fully periodic boundary conditions in all relevant
dimensions from d=2 to the upper critical dimension d=6. The problem exhibits
edge weights drawn from disorder distributions that allow for weights of either
sign. We are interested in in the full ensemble of loops with negative weight,
i.e. non-trivial (system spanning) loops as well as topologically trivial
("small") loops. The NWP phenomenon refers to the disorder driven proliferation
of system spanning loops of total negative weight. While previous studies where
focused on the latter loops, we here put under scrutiny the ensemble of small
loops. Our aim is to characterize -using this extensive and exhaustive
numerical study- the loop length distribution of the small loops right at and
below the critical point of the hypercubic setups by means of two independent
critical exponents. These can further be related to the results of previous
finite-size scaling analyses carried out for the system spanning loops. For the
numerical simulations we employed a mapping of the NWP model to a combinatorial
optimization problem that can be solved exactly by using sophisticated matching
algorithms. This allowed us to study here numerically exact very large systems
with high statistics.
