Thomson scattering in warm dense matter

Free electron lasers employing scattering of high-brilliant, coherent photons in the extreme ultraviolet (VUV), e.g. at FLASH (DESY Hamburg) or LCLS (Stanford), allow for a systematic study of basic plasma properties in the region of warm dense matter (WDM). WDM is characterized by condensed matter-like densities and temperatures of several eV. Collective Thomson scattering with VUV or x-ray has demonstrated its capacity for robust measurements of the free electron density and temperature in WDM. Collective excitations like plasmons (``electron feature'') appear as maxima in the scattering signal. The respective frequencies can be related to the free electron density. Furthermore, the asymmetry of the red- and blue shifted plasmon intensity gives the electron temperature due to detailed balance. We treat collective Thomson scattering in the Born-Mermin-approximation which includes collisions and present a generalized Gross-Bohm dispersion for plasmas. The influence of plasma inhomogeneities on the scattering spectrum is studied by comparing density and temperature averaged scattering signals with calculations assuming homogeneous targets. For the ``ion feature,'' results of semi-classical hypernetted chain (HNC) calculations and of quantum molecular dynamics simulations are shown for dense beryllium.