Statistical Properties of the Dense Hydrogen Plasma: an ab initio Molecular Dynamics Investigation

Abstract

The metallic regime of the hydrogen plasma is studied by ab initio Molecular Dynamics simulations, for classical protons and fully degenerate electrons, in the strong coupling regime of the protons. The breakdown of linear screening observed for decreasing density gives rise to a surprisingly rich low-temperature phase diagram, showing in particular a dramatic drop of the melting temperature of the proton crystal. Extensive dynamical simulations reveal the remarkable persistence of a weakly damped high-frequency ion acoustic mode (plasmon-like), even under conditions of strong electron screening. This collective mode should disappear in the molecular phase, thus providing a probe for the metal-insulator transition in a region of parameters where experiment is difficult to achieve. Finite-size effects arising in the simulation of liquid metals are discussed. The status of the dense Hydrogen matter is extensively reviewed in the introduction.

14 pages (twocolumn), 18 Postscript figures. To appear in Phys. Rev. E

References in corpus (3)

• Interatomic potentials from first-principles calculations: the force-matching method
• Molecular Dissociation in Hot, Dense Hydrogen
• Insulator-metal transition in solid hydrogen: Implication of electronic structure calculations for recent experiments

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• Hydrogen-Helium Mixtures in the Interiors of Giant Planets
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• Trial wave functions for High-Pressure Metallic Hydrogen
• Coupled Electron Ion Monte Carlo Calculations of Atomic Hydrogen
• Optimal basis set for electronic structure calculations in periodic systems