Collisional Plasma Shocks in a Warm Dense Matter Regime

The structure of collisional plasma shocks has been subject to an extensive, multi-decadal investigation – both in the hydrodynamic,¹ hybrid kinetic ion/electron fluid,² and fully kinetic ion/electron³ limits. Despite this, all of these studies apply exclusively to classical, weakly-coupled plasmas. Using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we obtain ion transport coefficients (shear viscosity and thermal conductivity) and the ion equation of state (EOS) corresponding to a subspace of the warm dense matter (WDM) regime. More specifically, we consider a plasma of fully degenerate electrons with moderate-to-strongly coupled ions. We find that the WDM ion transport coefficients and EOS differ markedly from their weak-coupling equivalents; and as a consequence, the structure of a WDM plasma shock strongly deviates from the classical picture.

¹V. D. Shafranov, Soviet Phys. JETP 5, 6 (1957).

²M. Casanova, O. Larroche, & J. P. Matte, PRL 67, 2143 (1991).

³S. E. Anderson, L. Chacón, W. T. Taitano, A. N. Simakov, & B. D. Keenan, "Fully kinetic simulations of strong steady-state collisional planar plasma shocks", submitted to PRL in June 2021 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.13108].