PAIRING AND SPONTANEOUS POLARIZATION IN DENSE HYDROGEN

Abstract

The many-body problem associated with dense hydrogen can represented by the standard interacting electron gas problem (complete with compensating charge continuum) augmented by the proton equivalent and a coupling between the two. This viewpoint is useful as a starting point in the pursuit of ground-state instabilities (particularly the onset of a charge density wave) as a function of the continuum charge density, and even more generally in the identification of forms for the fields required to establish a thermodynamic treatment via coherent state functional integral representations of the partition function for dense hydrogen.