Coulomb contribution to the direct current electrical conductivity of dense partially ionized plasmas

Abstract

The Coulomb contribution to the electrical conductivity of partially ionized plasmas is discussed and its general behavior is investigated. Recent experiments on the direct current conductivity in shock wave induced argon and xenon plasmas are analyzed in this context. Within the relaxation time approach, the Coulomb contribution is extracted by eliminating the contribution of scattering from neutrals. Alternatively, the Coulomb contribution can be calculated directly within linear-response theory. In particular, from the latter approach a generalized Spitzer factor is derived for taking into account electron-electron interactions within the relaxation time approximation. Experimental results for the Coulomb contribution to the electrical conductivity are in reasonable agreement with an interpolation formula derived from linear-response theory.

The Thermophysical Properties of Iron Plasma

“…Thus, the influence of e-e collisions should be taken into account, if a solution of kinetic equation is used to obtain the transport coefficients. The detailed discussion on this issue is presented in [40]. The influence of e-e collisions in τ -approximation can be included by an additional factor, introduced for the first time by Spitzer and Härm [41].…”

“…The influence of e-e collisions in τ -approximation can be included by an additional factor, introduced for the first time by Spitzer and Härm [41]. They have obtained for the conductivity of two-component fully ionized plasma that [39][40][41][42][43], the factors γ were generalized for the case of partially ionized plasma with account for the electron degeneracy. In these works the factor γ was directly inserted into characteristic time: τ → γτ .…”

Dielectric function of a collisional plasma for arbitrary ionic charge

“…For highly and moderately degenerate plasmas the influence of electron-electron collisions will be decreased due to Pauli blocking [52]. This effect can be taken into account, if one uses the expression for Spitzer factor in a degenerate electron plasma [53,54]:…”

Experimental Measurement of Self-Diffusion in a Strongly Coupled Plasma

“…However, their interpretation is complicated by the transient and often nonequilibrium nature of the plasmas, and they do not provide model-independent information on the effects of particle correlations at short time scales. These include, for example, measurement of the dynamic structure factor with x-ray Thomson scattering [29][30][31] and measurement of electrical conductivity using a variety of techniques [29,[32][33][34][35]. Comprehensive studies of selfdiffusivity [20,21,[36][37][38] exist for strongly coupled dusty plasmas, but these systems are typically two dimensional and, therefore, do not directly illuminate the kinetics of bulk, three-dimensional plasmas.…”