Excited States in Warm and Hot Dense Matter

Abstract

Accurate modeling of warm and hot dense matter is challenging in part due to the multitude of excited states that must be considered. In thermal density functional theory, these excited states are averaged over to produce a single, averaged, thermal ground state. Here we present a variational framework and model that includes explicit excited states. In this framework an excited state is defined by a set of effective one-electron occupation factors and the corresponding energy is defined by the effective one-body energy with an exchange and correlation term. The variational framework is applied to an atom-in-plasma model (a generalization of the so-called average atom model). Comparisons with a density functional theory based average atom model generally reveal good agreement in the calculated pressure, but the new model also gives access to the excitation energies and charge state distributions.

References in corpus (6)

• Extended First-Principles Molecular Dynamics Method From Cold Materials to Hot Dense Plasmas
• Properties of carbon up to 10 million kelvin from Kohn-Sham density functional theory molecular dynamics
• Multiple Scattering Theory for Dense Plasmas
• Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory Applied to Average Atom Opacity
• Dense plasma opacity via the multiple-scattering method
• Charge State Distributions in Dense Plasmas

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Predicting Excitation Energies in Warm Dense Matter
• Collisional stopping power of ions in warm dense matter