The 8th International Conference on Matter and Radiation at Extremes (ICMRE2025)

In hot dense plasma, the interaction between charged particles leads to the ionization potential depression (IPD), which further affects physical properties of plasma, such as opacity and equation of state. The experiment of IPD of solid-density Al plasma have indicated that present theoretical models cannot give reasonable descriptions of the IPD in hot dense plasma. So the reasonable theoretical methods are needed to describe the effects of hot dense environments on IPD, and the process of generating hot dense plasmas through the interaction between ultrashort laser pulse and solid-density matter also needs to be carefully considered. In the manuscript, two kinds of temperature for ion and electron are considered when we compute the ionization potential depression in hot dense plasma. And the influences of the hot dense environments are included from the electronic structure calculations by using the modified flexible atomic code (FAC), which has included the screening of free electrons and the correlation of ions by correlation functions obtained from the hyper-netted chain (HNC) approximation. A self-consistent-field method is used to calculate the electronic structures. Based on the calculations, the IPD is obtained through the two-step model. Considering the interaction of the femtosecond laser on the solid-density Al plasma of Ciricosta’s experiment, we use the two-temperature model to calculate the IPD in no-local thermodynamic equilibrium, and the theoretical results are good agreement with the experimental results. In addition, we also calculated the electron collision ionization cross section and compared it with the results from other models.

Warm Dense Matter