Modeling the effect of shear viscosity and diffusion in strongly coupled ionic mixtures

Viscosity and diffusion coefficients are evaluated for strongly coupled ionic mixtures using the Green-Kubo relations through equilibrium molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. These simulations enable the calculation of these transport properties through analysis of time series correlations, and the coupling between these two transport coefficients are compared to the Stokes-Einstein relation. The parameter space for the ionic mixtures for this research is characterized by the plasma coupling parameter, which ranges from 20-100. In this highly coupled regime, the interaction between the weakly and strongly charged mixture components are assessed by taking the cross-correlation of each species’ time series. Ultimately, understanding transport properties, such as viscosity and diffusion, for such charged mixtures may be used to facilitate modification to instability growth often encountered in inertial confinement fusion and high energy density experiments.