Equation of State for Dense Plasmas using the Multiple Scattering Method

Electronic structure methods for hot, dense plasmas often use density functional theory (DFT) with major additional approximations. For example, orbital-free DFT currently uses functionals that do not recover discrete core states, while average atom methods model one atom in an averaged plasma. Here we use the so-called multiple scattering method to solve the Kohn-Sham DFT equations for dense plasmas. The method is all-electron and does not use pseudopotentials. We find that equation of state calculations result in good agreement with other state-of-the-art methods, and find that computational cost does not increase with temperature, allowing access to very high temperature, non-degenerate systems.