Ion potential in warm dense matter: wake effects due to streaming degenerate electrons

Quantum computation of stopping power for inertial fusion target design

Stopping power is the rate at which a material absorbs the kinetic energy of a charged particle passing through it-one of many properties needed over a wide range of thermodynamic conditions in modeling inertial fusion implosions. First-principles stopping calculations are classically challenging because they involve the dynamics of large electronic systems far from equilibrium, with accuracies that are particularly difficult to constrain and assess in the warm-dense conditions preceding ignition. Here, we describe a protocol for using a fault-tolerant quantum computer to calculate stopping power from a first-quantized representation of the electrons and projectile. Our approach builds upon the electronic structure block encodings of Su et al. [PRX Quant. 2, 040332 (2021)], adapting and optimizing those algorithms to estimate observables of interest from the non-Born-Oppenheimer dynamics of multiple particle species at finite temperature. We also work out the constant factors associated with an implementation of a high-order Trotter approach to simulating a grid representation of these systems. Ultimately, we report logical qubit requirements and leading-order Toffoli costs for computing the stopping power of various projectile/target combinations relevant to interpreting and designing inertial fusion experiments. We estimate that scientifically interesting and classically intractable stopping power calculations can be quantum simulated with roughly the same number of logical qubits and about one hundred times more Toffoli gates than is required for state-of-the-art quantum simulations of industrially relevant molecules such as FeMoco or P450.

Ion energy-loss characteristics and friction in a free-electron gas at warm dense matter and nonideal dense plasma conditions

We investigate the energy-loss characteristics of an ion in warm dense matter (WDM) and dense plasmas concentrating on the influence of electronic correlations. The basis for our analysis is a recently developed ab initio quantum Monte Carlo- (QMC) based machine learning representation of the static local field correction (LFC) [Dornheim et al., J. Chem. Phys. 151, 194104 (2019)JCPSA60021-960610.1063/1.5123013], which provides an accurate description of the dynamical density response function of the electron gas at the considered parameters. We focus on the polarization-induced stopping power due to free electrons, the friction function, and the straggling rate. In addition, we compute the friction coefficient which constitutes a key quantity for the adequate Langevin dynamics simulation of ions. Considering typical experimental WDM parameters with partially degenerate electrons, we find that the friction coefficient is of the order of γ/ω_{pi}=0.01, where ω_{pi} is the ionic plasma frequency. This analysis is performed by comparing QMC-based data to results from the random-phase approximation (RPA), the Mermin dielectric function, and the Singwi-Tosi-Land-Sjölander (STLS) approximation. It is revealed that the widely used relaxation time approximation (Mermin dielectric function) has severe limitations regarding the description of the energy loss of ions in a correlated partially degenerate electrons gas. Moreover, by comparing QMC-based data with the results obtained using STLS, we find that the ion energy-loss properties are not sensitive to the inaccuracy of the static local field correction (LFC) at large wave numbers, k/k_{F}>2 (with k_{F} being the Fermi wave number), but that a correct description of the static LFC at k/k_{F}≲1.5 is important.

Multipole expansion in plasmas: Effective interaction potentials between compound particles

In this paper, the multipole expansion method is used to determine effective interaction potentials between particles in both classical dusty plasma and dense quantum plasma. In particular, formulas for interactions of dipole-dipole and charge-dipole pairs in a classical nondegenerate plasma as well as in degenerate quantum and semiclassical plasmas were derived. The potentials describe interactions between atoms, atoms and charged particles, dust particles in the complex plasma, atoms and electrons in the degenerate plasma, and metals. Correctness of the results obtained from the multipole expansion is confirmed by their agreement with the results based on other methods of statistical physics and dielectric response function. It is shown that the method of multipole expansion can be used to derive effective interaction potentials of compound particles, if the effect of the medium on the potential of individual particles comprising compound particles is known.

Effective potentials of interactions and thermodynamic properties of a nonideal two-temperature dense plasma

In this article a dense nonideal, nonisothermal plasma is considered. New effective screened interaction potentials taking into account quantum-mechanical diffraction and symmetry effects have been obtained. The effective potential of the ion-ion interaction in plasmas with a strongly coupled ion subsystem and semiclassical electron subsystem is presented. Based on the obtained effective potentials the analytical expressions for internal energy and the pressure of the considered plasma were obtained.