Singly-Thermostated Ergodicity in Gibbs' Canonical Ensemble and the 2016 Ian Snook Prize Award

Abstract

The 2016 Snook Prize has been awarded to Diego Tapias, Alessandro Bravetti, and David Sanders for their paper -- Ergodicity of One-Dimensional Systems Coupled to the Logistic Thermostat. They introduced a relatively stiff hyperbolic tangent thermostat force and successfully tested its ability to reproduce Gibbs' canonical distribution for the harmonic oscillator, the quartic oscillator, and the Mexican Hat potentials. Their work constitutes an effective response to the 2016 Ian Snook Prize Award goal -- Finding ergodic algorithms for Gibbs' canonical ensemble using a single thermostat variable. We confirm their work here and highlight an interesting feature of the Mexican Hat problem when it is solved with an adaptive integrator.