Abstract
The primary purpose of the HOPE code is to calculate opacities over a wide temperature and density range. It can also produce equation of state (EOS) data. Since the experimental data at the high temperature region are scarce, comparisons of predictions with the ample zero temperature data provide a valuable physics check of the code. In this report we show a selected few examples across the periodic table. Below we give a brief general information about the physics of the HOPE code. The HOPE code is an ''average atom'' (AA) Dirac-Slater self-consistent code. The AA label in the case of finite temperature means that the one-electron levels are populated according to the Fermi statistics, at zero temperature it means that the ''aufbau'' principle works, i.e. no a priory electronic configuration is set, although it can be done. As such, it is a one-particle model (any Hartree-Fock model is a one particle model). The code is an ''ion-sphere'' model, meaning that the atom under investigation is neutral within the ion-sphere radius. Furthermore, the boundary conditions for the bound states are also set at the ion-sphere radius, which distinguishes the code from the INFERNO, OPAL and STA codes. Once the self-consistent AAmore » state is obtained, the code proceeds to generate many-electron configurations and proceeds to calculate photoabsorption in the ''detailed configuration accounting'' (DCA) scheme. However, this last feature is meaningless at zero temperature. There is one important feature in the HOPE code which should be noted; any self-consistent model is self-consistent in the space of the occupied orbitals. The unoccupied orbitals, where electrons are lifted via photoexcitation, are unphysical. The rigorous way to deal with that problem is to carry out complete self-consistent calculations both in the initial and final states connecting photoexcitations, an enormous computational task. The Amaldi correction is an attempt to address this problem by distorting the outer part of the self-consistent potential in such a way that in the final state after photoexcitation or photoionization the newly occupied orbital sees the hole left in the initial state. This is very important to account for the large number of Rydberg states in the case of low densities. In the next Section we show calculated photoabsorptions compared with experimental data in figures with some rudimentary explanations.« less
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