Effective Potential Theory: A Practical Way to Extend Plasma Transport Theory to Strong Coupling

TL;DR

This paper introduces an effective potential theory that extends plasma transport models to strong coupling regimes by incorporating many-body correlations through the potential of mean force, improving accuracy for dense plasmas.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the effective potential approach accurately models strongly coupled plasmas, including Yukawa systems, within standard transport calculation frameworks.

Findings

Accurately extends plasma transport theory to strong coupling regimes.

Validates the approach for Yukawa one-component plasma models.

Provides comparison with other existing methods.

Abstract

The effective potential theory is a physically motivated method for extending traditional plasma transport theories to stronger coupling. It is practical in the sense that it is easily incorporated within the framework of the Chapman-Enskog or Grad methods that are commonly applied in plasma physics and it is computationally efficient to evaluate. The extension is to treat binary scatterers as interacting through the potential of mean force, rather than the bare Coulomb or Debye-screened Coulomb potential. This allows for aspects of many-body correlations to be included in the transport coefficients. Recent work has shown that this method accurately extends plasma theory to orders of magnitude stronger coupling when applied to the classical one-component plasma model. The present work shows that similar accuracy is realized for the Yukawa one-component plasma model and it provides a comparison with other approaches.