Charged Particle Transport in Non-Ideal Plasmas

Coulomb collisional processes in plasmas occur in many scenarios, ranging from particle and energy transport to wave damping, particulate drag, wake formation, and others. The theoretical description of these processes can be particularly challenging for plasmas, as the long range interactions preclude the use of simplifying approximations such as neglecting many-body effects, which are particularly important for non-ideal plasmas, such as dense plasmas found in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments and ultra-cold neutral plasmas (UCP). We have developed a simplified effective potential approach within a Boltzmann-type framework that yields accurate and computationally efficient fits for all of the relevant cross sections and collision integrals needed to construct transport coefficients. Our results, which span the UCP to ICF regimes, have been validated with molecular dynamics simulations for self-diffusion, interdiffusion, viscosity, thermal conductivity and stopping power. Molecular dynamics has also been used to examine the underlying assumptions of this Boltzmann approach through a categorization of behaviors of the velocity autocorrelation function in the Yukawa phase diagram.