A statistical approach to Stark broadening for complex ions

Lineshapes encode a wealth of information about the plasmas that produce them, including plasma composition, density, temperature, motion and rotation, and magnitude of electric and magnetic fields. In particular, Stark broadening encodes information about the electric microfields generated by neighboring ions in a plasma and is a valuable density diagnostic. Producing lineshapes for complex atoms with 3 or more active electrons using standard perturbation theory can have prohibitively high computational costs. We present a simple and computationally straightforward heuristic model that can be used for ions of any complexity. Our statistical approach uses transition energies, energy shifts, and radial density distributions from a self-consistent average atom code to produce Stark-broadened lineshapes. We present comparisons to standard line-broadening methods for lines from one-and two-electron aluminum ions.