Eur. Phys. J. B 48, 87-93 (2005)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2005-00372-3

Dynamical thermostatting and statistical ensembles

¹ Physics Department, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa
² Departament de Física and IMEDEA-CSIC, Universitat de les Illes Balears, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain
³ National University La Plata-CONICET, C.C. 727, 1900 La Plata, Argentina
⁴ Departamento de Física Teórica e Experimental, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, 59072-970, Natal, Brazil

Corresponding author: ^a arplastino@maple.up.ac.za

Received: 23 May 2005
Revised: 31 August 2005
Published online: 9 December 2005

Abstract

Dynamical thermostatting constitutes a procedure for computing thermodynamical mean values of classical dynamical systems that is of interest both from the practical and from the conceptual points of view. Here we extend and unify previous partial results, showing that the dynamical thermostatting approach can be implemented in order to simulate a wide family of statistical ensembles of general dynamical systems with a vanishing divergence and admitting an integral of motion. As a particular illustration, the thermostatting procedure is applied to power law-like maximum entropy ensembles.