Monte-Carlo approach to calculate the ionization of warm dense matter within particle-in-cell simulations

D. Wu, X. T. He, W. Yu, S. Fritzsche

Published 2016-07-10Version 1

A physical model based on Monte-Carlo approach is proposed to calculate the ionization dynamics of warm dense matters within particle-in-cell simulations, where impact ionization, electron-ion recombination and ionization potential depression (IPD) by surrounding plasmas are taken into consideration self-consistently. When compared with other models, which are applied in the literature for plasmas near thermal equilibrium, the temporal relaxation of ionizations can also be simulated by the proposed model with the final thermal equilibrium determined by the competition between impact ionization and its inverse process, i.e., electron-ion recombination. Our model is general and can be applied for both single elements and alloys with quite different compositions. The proposed model is implemented into a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation code, and the average ionization degree of bulk aluminium varying with temperature is calculated, showing good agreement with the data provided by FLYCHK code.