Beyond the Drude model in transport and optical properties of dense plasma of silver

Abstract

We calculate optical and transport properties of dense silver plasma via quantum molecular dynamics together with the Kubo-Greenwood formalism and compare the results with ones obtained using a semi-analytical Drude-like model. The quantum molecular dynamics highlights an important contribution of d-electrons to the properties of silver, and thus the thermal conductivity is not described by the Drude model. At the same time, the imaginary part of dielectric function can be fitted by the Drude-like model with reasonable accuracy in the optical range of frequencies.