Polarisation effects on core levels of a Ne impurity immersed in liquid metallic hydrogen

Abstract

By treating liquid metals (or plasmas) as mixtures consisting of electrons and m kinds of nuclei, a set of integral equations to determine the correlations between particles and bound energy levels are derived on the basis of the density-functional formalism. These equations calculate the electronic structure of an impurity in a liquid metal by taking the zero limit of impurity density. They are then applied to a Ne impurity immersed in liquid metallic hydrogen. A procedure to calculate the shift of the Lyman alpha line due to the polarisation of charge distributions around the impurity is shown. The edge shifts of the continuum spectrum radiated by electrons in the transition from free to 1s states are evaluated for Ne immersed in liquid metallic hydrogen at various densities and temperatures. Thus, the edge shifts are shown to be sensitive to the density of liquid metallic hydrogen rather than to the temperature, and bring about important information on the plasma diagnosis in the high-density region where the Lyman alpha line cannot be observed.