Testing Thermal Conductivity Models with Equilibrium Molecular Dynamics Simulations of the One Component Plasma

Equilibrium molecular dynamics (EMD) simulations are used to calculate the thermal conductivity of the one component plasma (OCP) via the Green-Kubo formalism. These simulations address previous discrepancies between the OCP thermal conductivity calculated from EMD and non-equilibrium MD. Analysis of heat flux autocorrelation functions show that very long (6 x 10$^{\mathrm{5}} \quad \omega_{\mathrm{p}}^{\mathrm{-1}})$ time series are needed to reduce the noise level to allow accurate time integration. The new simulations provide the first accurate data in the range 0.1 \textless $\Gamma $ \textless 2, allowing the evaluation of thermal conductivity models in a regime where they are predictive. We test calculations of thermal conductivity using generalized Coulomb logarithms from the theories of Lee-More, Landau-Spitzer, Tanaka-Ichimaru, and Baalrud-Daligualt and find that only the latter two can reproduce the trend of the MD data for 0.1 \textless $\Gamma $ \textless 10. The results provide the first test of the Landau-Spitzer thermal conductivity using MD and indicate that transport theories must include the effect of particle correlations to properly model $\Gamma $ \textgreater 0.3. None of the evaluated theories are found to accurately model the OCP for $\Gamma $ \textgreater 10.