Rostock 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SYAD: Symposium SAMOP Dissertation-Prize 2019

SYAD 1: SAMOP Dissertation-Prize

SYAD 1.2: Hauptvortrag

Dienstag, 12. März 2019, 11:00–11:30, U Audimax

The Uniform Electron Gas at Warm Dense Matter Conditions — •Simon Groth — Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany

Warm dense matter (WDM), an extreme state with densities exceeding solid state densities and temperatures of up to 10⁸ Kelvin, has emerged as one of the frontiers of modern plasma science. These conditions occur in astrophysical objects such as brown dwarfs and giant planets, as well as on the path to inertial confinement fusion—a possible source of clean energy. Consequently, WDM is nowadays intensively investigated in large research facilities around the globe.

Intriguingly, a rigorous theoretical description of WDM is highly challenging due to the presence of an intricate interplay of 1) Coulomb coupling, 2) thermal excitations, and 3) quantum degeneracy effects. Thermal density functional theory (DFT), which constitutes the most promising simulation technique, requires as input an accurate parametrization of the exchange-correlation free energy, f_xc, of the uniform electron gas (UEG)—perhaps the most fundamental model system in physics. To obtain such an exchange-correlation functional, we developed two quantum Monte Carlo methods and presented the first exact data for the warm dense UEG. In this way, we provided the key ingredient to thermal DFT and placed ab initio simulations of WDM on the same footing as its ubiquitous ground state analogon.