English

Ionization potential depression and Pauli blocking in degenerate plasmas at extreme densities

Plasma Physics 2019-03-13 v1 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

New facilities explore warm dense matter (WDM) at extreme conditions where the densities are very high (e.g., carbon up to density of 50 g cm3^{-3}) so that electrons are degenerate even at 100 eV temperature. Whereas in the non-degenerate region correlation effects such as Debye screening and its improvements are relevant for the ionization potential depression (IPD), new effects have to be considered in degenerate plasmas. In addition to the Fock shift of the self-energies, the bound-state Pauli blocking becomes important with increasing density. Taking these degeneracy effects into account leads to a reduction of the ionization potential and to a higher degree of ionization. Standard approaches to IPD such as Stewart-Pyatt and widely used opacity tables (e.g., OPAL) do not contain Pauli blocking effects for bound states so that they fail to explain experiments with WDM in the high density region. As example, results for the ionization degree of carbon plasmas are presented.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.12912,
  title  = {Ionization potential depression and Pauli blocking in degenerate plasmas at extreme densities},
  author = {Gerd Röpke and David Blaschke and Tilo Döppner and Chengliang Lin and Wolf-Dietrich Kraeft and Ronald Redmer and Heidi Reinholz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.12912},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

15 pages, 3 figures