Temperature Relaxation in Hot Dense Hydrogen

TL;DR

This paper investigates temperature relaxation in hot dense hydrogen relevant to inertial confinement fusion, comparing molecular dynamics and quantum theory results with classical Landau-Spitzer predictions across a range of temperatures and densities.

Contribution

It introduces new molecular dynamics simulations and quantum many-body calculations to analyze temperature equilibration in dense hydrogen, highlighting deviations from classical models.

Findings

Relaxation is slower than Landau-Spitzer predictions at lower temperatures.

Convergence to Landau-Spitzer results occurs at very high temperatures.

Results are consistent across different densities and temperature ranges.

Abstract

Temperature equilibration of hydrogen is studied for conditions relevant to inertial confinement fusion. New molecular-dynamics simulations and results from quantum many-body theory are compared with Landau-Spitzer (LS) predictions for temperatures T from 50 eV to 5000 eV, and densities with Wigner-Seitz radii r_s = 1.0 and 0.5. The relaxation is slower than the LS result, even for temperatures in the keV range, but converges to agreement in the high-T limit.