Thermodynamic and Transport Properties of Equilibrium Debye Plasmas.

Gianpiero Colonna,Annarita Laricchiuta

doi:10.3390/e22020237

Abstract

The thermodynamic and transport properties of weakly non-ideal, high-density partially ionized hydrogen plasma are investigated, accounting for quantum effects due to the change in the energy spectrum of atomic hydrogen when the electron–proton interaction is considered embedded in the surrounding particles. The complexity of the rigorous approach led to the development of simplified models, able to include the neighbor-effects on the isolated system while remaining consistent with the traditional thermodynamic approach. High-density conditions have been simulated assuming particle interactions described by a screened Coulomb potential.

Highlights

The development of new technologies and experimental techniques has triggered intensive theoretical studies on modeling spatially confined quantum systems [1,2] and extreme-high-pressure plasmas [3] like in stellar envelopes [4]
Hot dense hydrogen and deuterium plasmas can be generated in a laboratory with shock compression, allowing the experimental accurate determination of the molecular-to-atomic transition along the principal Hugoniot to be compared with theoretical first-principle results [12]
It is worth noting that atomic properties and the dynamics of collisions change in high-density regimes and are the subject in recent years of an intense investigation focused on the atomic hydrogen system

Summary

Introduction

The development of new technologies and experimental techniques has triggered intensive theoretical studies on modeling spatially confined quantum systems [1,2] and extreme-high-pressure plasmas [3] like in stellar envelopes [4]. The chemical picture of the interaction offered by the Yukawa potential fails in a strongly correlated quantum regime, where other effects need to be accounted for, such as the ion-ion correlation, the electron exchange, the consistent statistics for electrons and the accurate ab initial molecular dynamics method has to be resorted to [28,29,30] Another important issue in both weakly- and strongly-coupled plasmas and neglected in this paper is the dynamical nature of screening, affecting the interaction potential between electrons and ions, and in turn, the transport properties of the plasma and the dynamics of elastic and reactive collisions [21,31,32]. The effect of dynamic screening on scattering processes in weakly-coupled plasmas has been investigated [25,33,34], showing that the use of static screening overestimates the shielding, we would expect an increase of the elastic transport cross-sections reducing the electrical and thermal conductivities

Thermodynamics

Transport

Conclusions