Electrical conductivity of high-pressure liquid hydrogen by quantum Monte Carlo methods

Understand

We compute the electrical conductivity for liquid hydrogen at high pressure using quantum Monte Carlo.

• The method uses Coupled Electron-Ion Monte Carlo to generate configurations of liquid hydrogen.
• For each configuration correlated sampling of electrons is performed in order to calculate a set of lowest many-body eigenstates and current-current correlation functions of the system, which are summed over in the many-body Kubo formula to give AC electrical conductivity directly.
• The extrapolated DC conductivity at 3000 K for several densities shows a liquid semiconductor to liquid-metal transition at high pressure.