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We study a 1-dimensional chain of N weakly anharmonic classical oscillators coupled at its ends to heat baths at different temperatures. Each oscillator is subject to pinning potential and it also interacts with its nearest neighbors. In our set up both potentials are homogeneous and bounded (with N dependent bounds) perturbations of the harmonic ones. We show how a generalised version of Bakry–Emery theory can be adapted to this case of a hypoelliptic generator which is inspired by Baudoin (J Funct Anal 273(7):2275-2291, 2017). By that we prove exponential convergence to non-equilibrium steady state in Wasserstein–Kantorovich distance and in relative entropy with quantitative rates. We estimate the constants in the rate by solving a Lyapunov-type matrix equation and we obtain that the exponential rate, for the homogeneous chain, has order bigger than N - 3 . For the purely harmonic chain the order of the rate is in [ N - 3 , N - 1 ] . This shows that, in this set up, the spectral gap decays at most polynomially with N. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present contribution investigates the dynamics generated by the two-dimensional Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck equation for charged particles in a steady inhomogeneous background of opposite charges. We provide global in time estimates that are uniform with respect to initial data taken in a bounded set of a weighted L2 space, and where dependencies on the mean-free path τ and the Debye length δ are made explicit. In our analysis the mean free path covers the full range of possible values: from the regime of evanescent collisions τ→∞ to the strongly collisional regime τ→0. As a counterpart, the largeness of the Debye length, that enforces a weakly nonlinear regime, is used to close our nonlinear estimates. Accordingly we pay a special attention to relax as much as possible the τ-dependent constraint on δ ensuring exponential decay with explicit τ-dependent rates towards the stationary solution. In the strongly collisional limit τ→0, we also examine all possible asymptotic regimes selected by a choice of observation time scale. Here also, our emphasis is on strong convergence, uniformity with respect to time and to initial data in bounded sets of a L2 space. Our proofs rely on a detailed study of the nonlinear elliptic equation defining stationary solutions and a careful tracking and optimization of parameter dependencies of hypocoercive/hypoelliptic estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss a dynamical technique for sampling the canonical measure in molecular dynamics. We present a method that generalizes a recently proposed scheme (Samoletov et al., J. Stat. Phys. 128:1321–1336, ), and which controls temperature by use of a device similar to that of Nosé dynamics, but adds random noise to improve ergodicity. In contrast to Langevin dynamics, where noise is added directly to each physical degree of freedom, the new scheme relies on an indirect coupling to a single Brownian particle. For a model with harmonic potentials, we show under a mild non-resonance assumption that we can recover the canonical distribution. In spite of its stochastic nature, experiments suggest that it introduces a relatively weak perturbative effect on the physical dynamics, as measured by perturbation of temporal autocorrelation functions. The kinetic energy is well controlled even in the early stages of a simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the long time behavior of an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process under the influence of a periodic drift. We prove that, under the standard diffusive rescaling, the law of the particle position converges weakly to the law of a Brownian motion whose covariance can be expressed in terms of the solution of a Poisson equation. We also derive upper bounds on the convergence rate in several metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]