Calculating Transport Coefficients in Warm Dense Matter with the Strongly Coupled Transport (SCOUT) Code

When using a hydrodynamic description of warm dense matter and high energy den- sity plasmas, traditional theories for transport coefficients begin to break down. In this regime, collisions are not determined by binary Coulomb collisions, but instead by many body Coulomb collisions. The Mean Force Kinetic Theory (MFKT) [S. D. Baalrud and J. Daligault, Phys. Plasmas 26, 082106 (2019)] provides an alternate closure to the BBGKY hierarchy based on expanding about a perturbation from equilibrium rather than about strength of correlations and extends plasma theory into the strongly coupled regime. The MFKT produces the same fluid equations as the traditional theories, but with altered trans- port coefficients and equation of state (EOS). Thus, existing fluid codes would only need to update transport and EOS tables. The Strongly Coupled Transport (SCOUT) code is presented which solves for transport coefficients in the warm dense matter regime using a Chapman-Enskog expansion for the MFKT. The MFKT is extended into the WDM regime by including the effects of degenerate electrons, whose screening effect are modeled by the potential of mean force which is obtained using an Average Atom (AA) and Quantum Hyper-Netted Chain (QHNC) model [C. E. Starrett and Saumon, HEDP 10, 35-42 (2014)]. Additionally, when needed a quantum description of electron scattering is used to calculate cross-sections.