Energy losses of fast heavy-ion projectiles in dense hydrogen plasmas

TL;DR

This paper investigates corrections to the Bethe-Larkin energy loss formula for fast heavy-ion projectiles in dense hydrogen plasmas, emphasizing electron-ion correlations and the effects of dicluster charge distributions.

Contribution

It provides numerical estimates of correlation corrections based on simulations and extends the analysis to dicluster projectiles, enhancing experimental visibility.

Findings

Correlation corrections depend on electron-ion pair distribution functions.

Dicluster projectiles increase the visibility of correlation effects.

Generalization to multispecies plasmas is straightforward.

Abstract

It has been recently shown that the Bethe-Larkin formula for the energy losses of fast heavy-ion projectiles in dense hydrogen plasmas is corrected by the electron-ion correlations [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{101}, 075002 (2008)]. We report numerical estimates of this correction based on the values of $g_{ei}(0)$ obtained by numerical simulations in [Phys. Rev. E \textbf{61}, 3470 (2000)]. We also extend this result to the case of projectiles with dicluster charge distribution. We show that the experimental visibility of the electron-ion correlation correction is enhanced in the case of dicluster projectiles with randomly orientated charge centers. Although we consider here the hydrogen plasmas to make the effect physically more clear, the generalization to multispecies plasmas is straightforward.