The wide-range model of shell effects in hot plasma with semiclassical approximation for bound electrons

Abstract

The state-of-the-art density functional theory (DFT) methods provide high quality data about materials properties at extremes. The cost for this is the days of modern supercomputers operation to obtain a set of particular points on a phase diagram. Moreover, the low density region is usually unreachable for these methods due to convergence issues. We demonstrate that an adequate wide-range model of electron subsystem may be constructed using the simple Thomas–Fermi approach corrected by introducing semiclassical bound states instead of continuous ones. The obtained thermodynamic properties are compared to Saha and Kohn–Sham DFT data with good agreement thus covering the region between low and normal densities of hot plasma.