Conservative dielectric functions and electrical conductivities from the multicomponent Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook equation

TL;DR

This paper develops a new multi-species susceptibility from the BGK kinetic equation that conserves number and momentum, satisfying the f-sum rule, and introduces a non-Drude conductivity model demonstrating the importance of conservation laws.

Contribution

It introduces the completed Mermin susceptibility conserving number and momentum, and a new non-Drude conductivity model with free parameters, advancing the theoretical description of plasma response functions.

Findings

Completed Mermin susceptibility satisfies the f-sum rule.

Momentum conservation affects the DSF shape in plasma conditions.

Smith's phenomenological parameter violates local number conservation.

Abstract

A considerable number of semi-empirical and first-principles models have been created to describe the dynamic response of a collisionally damped charged-particle system. However, known challenges persist for established dynamic structure factors (DSF), dielectric functions, and conductivities. For instance, the semi-empirical Drude-Smith conductivity [N.M. Smith, Phys. Rev. B 64, 155106 (2001)] lacks interpretability, and the first-principles Mermin dielectric function [N.D. Mermin, Phys. Rev. B, 1, 2362 (1970)] does not satisfy the frequency sum rule [G.S. Atwal and N.W. Ashcroft, Phys. Rev. B 65, 115109 (2002)]. In this work, starting from the multicomponent Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) kinetic equation, we produce a multi-species susceptibility that conserves number and momentum, which we refer to as the ``completed Mermin'' susceptibility, and we explore its properties and uses. We show that the completed Mermin susceptibility satisfies the frequency sum (f-sum) rule. We compute the associated DSF and find that momentum conservation qualitatively impacts the DSF's shape for a carbon-contaminated deuterium and tritium plasma under NIF hot-spot conditions. In the appendices, we provide numerical implementations of the completed Mermin susceptibility, for the reader's convenience. Further, we produce a new non-Drude conductivity model, by taking the single-species limit and introducing free parameters in the terms that enforce number and momentum conservation. To illustrate how number and momentum conservation impact the dynamical conductivity shape, we apply our conductivity model to dynamical gold conductivity measurements [Z. Chen, et al., Nature communications, 12.1, 1638, (2021)]. Finally, comparing our model to the Drude-Smith conductivity model, we conclude that Smith's phenomenological parameter violates local number conservation.