Exponential relaxation of the Nos\'e-Hoover equation under Brownian heating

Abstract

We study a stochastic perturbation of the Nos\'e-Hoover equation (called the Nos\'e-Hoover equation under Brownian heating) and show that the dynamics converges at a geometric rate to the augmented Gibbs measure in a weighted total variation distance. The joint marginal distribution of the position and momentum of the particles in turn converges exponentially fast in a similar sense to the canonical Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution. The result applies to a general number of particles interacting through wide class of potential functions, including the usual polynomial type as well as the singular Lennard-Jones variety.