Average Atom Self Energy Line Broadening in Hot Dense Plasmas

Spectral line shapes describe the distribution of opacity from bound-bound electronic transitions, which is a critical soruce of absorption and emission in many hot dense laboratory and astrophysical plasmas. The dominant broadening mechanism in many dense plasmas is pressure broadening, or Stark broadening, caused by neighboring ions and electrons which perturb the transition energies of radiating atoms. Stark broadened line shape models often rely on low-density approximations, which break down when approaching solid-density plasma conditions where quantum electronic structure becomes important. In this talk we present a new approach to calculating electron broadening in dense plasmas, using self energy calculations from density functional theory (DFT) based average atoms. We then compare our new line shapes to traditional semi-analytic and simulation-based line shape codes for a range of different plasma conditions, and discuss applications of this work to recent laboratory opacity experiments.