Düsseldorf 2007 – scientific programme

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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik

P 7: Poster

P 7.17: Poster

Monday, March 19, 2007, 16:30–18:30, Poster A

Plasma phase transition in deuterium: direct path-integral Monte-Carlo calculations and new experimental results — •Vladimir Filinov^1,2, Pavel Levashov¹, Michael Bonitz², Vladimir Fortov¹, M.A. Mochalov³, and M.V. Zhernokletov³ — ¹Institute for High Energy Densities RAS, Moscow, Russia — ²Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel, Institut für Theoretische Physik und Astrophysik — ³Russian Federal Nuclear Center, All-Russia Research Institute of Experimental Physics, Sarov, Russia

The Plasma phase transition (PPT) is known as a possible Coulomb correlation effect in dense quantum plasmas for many decades, but up to now, there was no experimental confirmation. Recently reliable experimental measurements of the density along a quasi-isentrope of deuterium have been performed by Mochalov et al. who compressed deuterium in a cylindrical vessel by a number of shock waves. For the density measurement two gamma sources were used. The experiments showed a remarkable density jump (of about 30%) at nearly constant pressure (around 1.4 Mbar) and temperature (around 5.000K). This density jump is surprisingly close to the theoretically predicted instability region. Therefore, it is expected that this experiment is the first evidence for the plasma phase transition in dense deuterium. In this contribution we show the basic experimental results and present new first principle direct fermionic path integral Monte Carlo simulations which confirm the PPT.

This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft via SFB-TR24.