Virial Expansion of the Electrical Conductivity of Hydrogen Plasmas

TL;DR

This paper develops a virial expansion approach to accurately describe the electrical conductivity of low-density hydrogen plasmas, providing benchmarks for simulations and insights into electron-electron collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a virial expansion method for hydrogen plasma conductivity and compares it with advanced simulation techniques, enhancing understanding of low-density plasma behavior.

Findings

Quantum statistical methods provide exact virial coefficients.

Virial expansion serves as a benchmark for DFT-MD and PIMC simulations.

New DFT-MD results for low-density hydrogen plasmas are presented.

Abstract

The low-density limit of the electrical conductivity $\sigma(n,T)$ of hydrogen as the simplest ionic plasma is presented as function of temperature T and mass density n in form of a virial expansion of the resistivity. Quantum statistical methods yield exact values for the lowest virial coefficients which serve as benchmark for analytical approaches to the electrical conductivity as well as for numerical results obtained from density functional theory based molecular dynamics simulations (DFT-MD) or path-integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations. While these simulations are well suited to calculate $\sigma(n,T)$ in a wide range of density and temperature, in particular for the warm dense matter region, they become computationally expensive in the low-density limit, and virial expansions can be utilized to balance this drawback. We present new results of DFT-MD simulations in that regime and discuss the account of electron-electron collisions by comparing with the virial expansion.