Tomorr Haxhimali

Shear viscosity for dense plasmas by equilibrium molecular dynamics in asymmetric Yukawa ionic mixtures

We present molecular dynamics (MD) calculations of shear viscosity for asymmetric mixed plasma for thermodynamic conditions relevant to astrophysical and inertial confinement fusion plasmas. Specifically, we consider mixtures of deuterium and argon at temperatures of 100-500 eV and a number density of 10^{25} ions/cc. The motion of 30,000-120,000 ions is simulated in which the ions interact via the Yukawa (screened Coulomb) potential. The electric field of the electrons is included in this effective interaction; the electrons are not simulated explicitly. Shear viscosity is calculated using the Green-Kubo approach with an integral of the shear stress autocorrelation function, a quantity calculated in the equilibrium MD simulations. We systematically study different mixtures through a series of simulations with increasing fraction of the minority high-Z element (Ar) in the D-Ar plasma mixture. In the more weakly coupled plasmas, at 500 eV and low Ar fractions, results from MD compare very well with Chapman-Enskog kinetic results. In the more strongly coupled plasmas, the kinetic theory does not agree well with the MD results. We develop a simple model that interpolates between classical kinetic theories at weak coupling and the Murillo Yukawa viscosity model at higher coupling. This hybrid kinetics-MD viscosity model agrees well with the MD results over the conditions simulated, ranging from moderately weakly coupled to moderately strongly coupled asymmetric plasma mixtures.

Diffusivity of Mixtures in Warm Dense Matter Regime

Modeling of ionic diffusion in warm dense plasma mixtures has been of longstanding interest in astrophysics and in Inertial Confinement Fusion. Here we review traditional approaches to calculating plasma diffusion using kinetic theory. We also review earlier classical molecular dynamics (MD) results. We discuss some new results from MD for self and mutual diffusion in a mixture of deuterium and argon at warm dense matter regime. We make use of Yukawa interionic potentials as an effective potential that accounts for the screening effects of the electrons to the ions. We further provide a general description of the Green-Kubo technique to extract the diffusivity of a multicomponent mixture. The description is very general and it can be extended to plasmas.

A Time Dependent Ginzburg-Landau Phase Field Formalism for Shocked Induced Phase Transition

Phase-field models have become popular in the last two decades to describe a host of free-boundary problems. The strength of the method relies on implicitly describing the dynamics of surfaces and interfaces by a continuous scalar field that enters the global grand free energy functional of the system. Here we explore the potential utility of this method in order to describe shock-induced phase transitions. To this end we make use of the Multiphase Field Theory (MFT) to account for the existence of multiple phases during the transition, and we couple MFT to a hydrodynamic model in the context of a new LLNL code for phase transitions, SAMSA. As a demonstration of this approach, we apply our code to the α − e-Fe phase transition under shock wave loading conditions and compare our results with experiments of Jensen et. al. [J. Appl. Phys., 105:103502 (2009)] and Barker and Hollenbach [J. Appl. Phys., 45:4872 (1974)].