[en] Hot dense radiative (HDR) plasmas common to Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and stellar interiors have high temperature (a few hundred eV to tens of keV), high density (tens to hundreds of g/cc) and high pressure (hundreds of Megabars to thousands of Gigabars). Typically, such plasmas undergo collisional, radiative, atomic and possibly thermonuclear processes. In order to describe HDR plasmas, computational physicists in ICF and astrophysics use atomic-scale microphysical models implemented in various simulation codes. Experimental validation of the models used to describe HDR plasmas are difficult to perform. Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of the many-body interactions of plasmas is a promising approach to model validation but, previous work either relies on the collisionless approximation or ignores radiation. We present four methods that attempt a new numerical simulation technique to address a currently unsolved problem: the extension of molecular dynamics to collisional plasmas including emission and absorption of radiation. The first method applies the Lienard-Weichert solution of Maxwell's equations for a classical particle whose motion is assumed to be known (section 3). The second method expands the electromagnetic field in normal modes (plane-waves in a box with periodic boundary-conditions) and solves the equation for wave amplitudes coupled to the particle motion (section 4). The third method is a hybrid MD/MC (molecular dynamics/Monte Carlo) method which calculates radiation emitted or absorbed by electron-ion pairs during close collisions (section 5). The fourth method is a generalization of the third method to include small clusters of particles emitting radiation during close encounters: one electron simultaneously hitting two ions, two electrons simultaneously hitting one ion, etc.(section 6). This approach is inspired by the Virial expansion method of equilibrium statistical mechanics.

[en] Hot dense radiative (HDR) plasmas common to Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and stellar interiors have high temperature (a few hundred eV to tens of keV), high density (tens to hundreds of g/cc) and high pressure (hundreds of megabars to thousands of gigabars). Typically, such plasmas undergo collisional, radiative, atomic and possibly thermonuclear processes. In order to describe HDR plasmas, computational physicists in ICF and astrophysics use atomic-scale microphysical models implemented in various simulation codes. Experimental validation of the models used to describe HDR plasmas are difficult to perform. Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of the many-body interactions of plasmas is a promising approach to model validation but, previous work either relies on the collisionless approximation or ignores radiation. We present four methods that attempt a new numerical simulation technique to address a currently unsolved problem: the extension of molecular dynamics to collisional plasmas including emission and absorption of radiation. The first method applies the Lienard-Weichert solution of Maxwell's equations for a classical particle whose motion is assumed to be known. The second method expands the electromagnetic field in normal modes (planewaves in a box with periodic boundary-conditions) and solves the equation for wave amplitudes coupled to the particle motion. The third method is a hybrid molecular dynamics/Monte Carlo (MD/MC) method which calculates radiation emitted or absorbed by electron-ion pairs during close collisions. The fourth method is a generalization of the third method to include small clusters of particles emitting radiation during close encounters: one electron simultaneously hitting two ions, two electrons simultaneously hitting one ion, etc. This approach is inspired by the virial expansion method of equilibrium statistical mechanics. Using a combination of these methods we believe it is possible to do atomic-scale particle simulations of fusion ignition plasmas including the important effects of radiation emission and absorption.

[en] Ab initio molecular dynamics calculations are adapted to treat dense plasmas for temperatures exceeding the electronic Fermi temperature. Extended electronic states are obtained in a plane wave basis by using pseudopotentials for the ion cores in the local density approximation to density functional theory. The method reduces to conventional first principles molecular dynamics at low temperatures with the expected high level of accuracy. The occurrence of thermally excited ion cores at high temperatures is treated by means of final state pseudopotentials. The method is applied to the shock compression Hugoniot equation of state for aluminum. Good agreement with experiment is found for temperatures ranging from zero through 105K

[en] Hot dense radiative (HDR) plasmas common to Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and stellar interiors have high temperature (a few hundred eV to tens of keV), high density (tens to hundreds of g/cc) and high pressure (hundreds of Megabars to thousands of Gigabars). Typically, such plasmas undergo collisional, radiative, atomic and possibly thermonuclear processes. In order to describe HDR plasmas, computational physicists in ICF and astrophysics use atomic-scale microphysical models implemented in various simulation codes. Experimental validation of the models used to describe HDR plasmas are difficult to perform. Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of the many-body interactions of plasmas is a promising approach to model validation but, previous work either relies on the collisionless approximation or ignores radiation. We present a new numerical simulation technique to address a currently unsolved problem: the extension of molecular dynamics to collisional plasmas including emission and absorption of radiation. The new technique passes a key test: it relaxes to a blackbody spectrum for a plasma in local thermodynamic equilibrium. This new tool also provides a method for assessing the accuracy of energy and momentum exchange models in hot dense plasmas. As an example, we simulate the evolution of non-equilibrium electron, ion, and radiation temperatures for a hydrogen plasma using the new molecular dynamics simulation capability

[en] The temperature equilibration rate in dense hydrogen (for both T_i > T_e and T_i < T_e) has been calculated with large-scale molecular dynamics simulations for temperatures between 10 and 300 eV and densities between 10²⁰/cc to 10²⁴/cc. Careful attention has been devoted to convergence of the simulations, including the role of semiclassical potentials. We find that for Coulomb logarithms L ∼> 1, Brown-Preston-Singleton (Brown et al., Phys. Rep. 410, 237 (2005)) with the sub-leading corrections and the fit of Gericke-Murillo-Schlanges (Gericke et al., PRE 65, 036418 (2003)) to the T-matrix evaluation of the collision operator, agrees with the MD data to within the error bars of the simulation. For more strongly-coupled plasmas where L ∼< 1, our numerical results are consistent with the fit of Gericke-Murillo-Schlanges

[en] Hot dense radiative (HDR) plasmas common to inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and stellar interiors have high temperature (a few hundred eV to tens of keV), high density (tens to hundreds of g/cc) and high pressure (hundreds of Megabars to thousands of Gigabars). Typically, such plasmas undergo collisional, radiative, atomic and possibly thermonuclear processes. In order to describe HDR plasmas, computational physicists in ICF and astrophysics use atomic-scale microphysical models implemented in various simulation codes. Experimental validations of the models used for describing HDR plasmas are difficult to perform. Direct numerical simulation (DNS) of the many-body interactions of plasmas is a promising approach to model validation, but previous work either relies on the collisionless approximation or ignores radiation. We present a first attempt at a new numerical simulation technique to address a currently unsolved problem: the extension of molecular dynamics to collisional plasmas including emission and absorption of radiation. The new technique passes a key test: it relaxes to a blackbody spectrum for a plasma in local thermodynamic equilibrium. This new tool also provides a method for assessing the accuracy of energy and momentum exchange models in hot dense plasmas. As an example, we simulate the evolution of non-equilibrium electron, ion and radiation temperatures for a hydrogen plasma using the new molecular dynamics simulation capability