  The path integral molecular dynamics (PIMD) method provides a convenient way
to compute the quantum mechanical structural and thermodynamic properties of
condensed phase systems at the expense of introducing an additional set of
high-frequency normal modes on top of the physical vibrations of the system.
Efficiently sampling such a wide range of frequencies provides a considerable
thermostatting challenge. Here we introduce a simple stochastic path integral
Langevin equation (PILE) thermostat which exploits an analytic knowledge of the
free path integral normal mode frequencies. We also apply a recently-developed
colored-noise thermostat based on a generalized Langevin equation (GLE), which
automatically achieves a similar, frequency-optimized sampling. The sampling
efficiencies of these thermostats are compared with that of the more
conventional Nos\'e-Hoover chain (NHC) thermostat for a number of physically
relevant properties of the liquid water and hydrogen-in-palladium systems. In
nearly every case, the new PILE thermostat is found to perform just as well as
the NHC thermostat while allowing for a computationally more efficient
implementation. The GLE thermostat also proves to be very robust delivering a
near-optimum sampling efficiency in all of the cases considered. We suspect
that these simple stochastic thermostats will therefore find useful application
in many future PIMD simulations.
