Enhanced damping of ion acoustic waves in dense plasmas

Abstract

A theory for the ion-acoustic wave damping in dense plasmas and warm dense matter, accounting for the Umklapp process, is presented. A higher decay rate compared to the prediction from the Landau damping theory is predicted for high-Z dense plasmas, where the electron density ranges from 1021 to 1024 cm−3 and the electron temperature is moderately higher than the Fermi energy.