A Model of Electron Transport in Dense Plasmas Spanning Temperature Regimes

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We present a new model of electron transport in warm and hot dense plasmas which combines the quantum Landau-Fokker-Planck equation with the concept of mean-force scattering.

• We obtain electrical and thermal conductivities across several orders of magnitude in temperature, from warm dense matter conditions to hot, nondegenerate plasma conditions, including the challenging crossover regime between the two.
• The small-angle approximation characteristic of Fokker-Planck collision theories is mitigated to good effect by the construction of accurate effective Coulomb logarithms based on mean-force scattering, which allows the theory to remain accurate even at low temperatures, as compared with high-fidelity quantum simulation results.
• Electron-electron collisions are treated on equal footing as electron-ion collisions.