A Systematic Study of Plasma Screening on High Energy Density Plasmas

A systematic calculation of plasma screening effects on atomic structure for all ions of Z=1 to 36 has been carried out using the Flexible Atomic Code. The screening potential is obtained within the framework of Stewart-Pyatt model (Stewart & Pyatt, ApJ 144). The shifts in ionization potentials of bound electron radial orbitals up to principal quantum number 10 and all orbital angular momenta are tabulated on a grid of electron densities and temperatures. Due to the slight differences in the screening effects on different radial orbitals, this tabulated database enables us to not only determine the continuum lowering of the ground states, but also transition energy shifts within the same ionization stages. A new continuum lowering model based on this table has been implemented in the spectroscopic modeling tools developed at the Prism Computational Sciences, such as PrismSPECT and Spect3D. The database of ionization potential shifts is a significant improvement over analytical formulas often employed for ionization potential depression, and can be easily imported in other spectroscopic modelling codes, such as FLYCHK (H.-K. Chung et. al., HEDP v1. P3)