Temperature Dependence of the Kinetic Energy of the Correlated Electron Plasma by Restricted Path-Integral Molecular Dynamics

Recent progress in orbital-free Density Functional Theory (OF-DFT), particularly with regard to temperature dependent functionals, has promise for the simulation of warm dense matter (WDM) systems. WDM includes systems with densities of an order of magnitude beyond ambient or more and temperatures measured in kilokelvin. A challenge for the development of temperature dependent OF-DFT functionals is the lack of benchmark information with temperature and pressure dependence on simple models under WDM conditions. We present an approach to fill this critical gap using the restricted path-integral molecular dynamics (rPIMD) method. Electrons are described as harmonic necklaces within the discrete path integral representation while quantum exchange takes the form of cross linking between electron necklaces. A molecular dynamics algorithm is used to sample phase space and the fermion sign problem is addressed by restricting the density matrix to positive values. The temperature dependence of kinetic energies for the strongly coupled electron plasma is presented for a number of Wigner-Seitz radii in terms of a fourth order Sommerfeld expansion.