Thermodynamic functions of dense plasmas: analytic approximations for astrophysical applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews and improves analytic approximations for thermodynamic functions of dense, fully ionized plasmas, covering various plasma regimes relevant to astrophysics, and provides publicly available computational tools.

Contribution

It introduces improved analytic approximations for plasma thermodynamics and shares a publicly available code for calculations across diverse plasma conditions.

Findings

Enhanced accuracy of thermodynamic function approximations.

Applicable to a wide range of plasma regimes including quantum and classical.

Provides a publicly accessible computational tool.

Abstract

We briefly review analytic approximations of thermodynamic functions of fully ionized nonideal electron-ion plasmas, applicable in a wide range of plasma parameters, including the domains of nondegenerate and degenerate, nonrelativistic and relativistic electrons, weakly and strongly coupled Coulomb liquids, classical and quantum Coulomb crystals. We present improvements to previously published approximations. Our code for calculation of thermodynamic functions based on the reviewed approximations is made publicly available.