A thermostat algorithm generating target ensembles

Abstract

We present a deterministic algorithm called contact density dynamics that generates any prescribed target distribution in the physical phase space. Akin to the famous model of Nos\'e-Hoover, our algorithm is based on a non-Hamiltonian system in an extended phase space. However the equations of motion in our case follow from contact geometry and we show that in general they have a similar form to those of the so-called density dynamics algorithm. As a prototypical example, we apply our algorithm to produce Gibbs canonical distribution for a one-dimensional harmonic oscillator.