Kinetic modeling for strongly coupled plasma mixtures

Kinetic modeling for strongly coupled plasma mixtures Numerical simulations of strongly coupled plasmas play a vital role in high energy density experiments. A common method for simulating strongly coupled plasmas is molecular dynamics (MD) which explicitly integrates the equations of motion for individual particles including correlations between them. Instead of MD, we propose a model based on kinetic theory which includes strong-coupling through a self-consistent electric field and collision operator. Our kinetic model allows us to simulate strongly coupled plasma mixtures at much larger space and time scales than MD. We apply our numerical method to simulate ongoing ultracold neutral plasma experiments where we discuss the impact of different collision operators in our kinetic model. Namely we show numerical results for the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook and Lenard-Bernstein-Dougherty operators. We also discuss the various treatments for the underlying electron species by evolving the electrons as their own species or via a Boltzmann distribution.