How to model quantum plasmas
By Giovanni Manfredi. 2005
313 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Traditional plasma physics has mainly focused on regimes characterized by high temperatures and low densities, for which quantum-mechanical effects have virtually no impact. However, recent technological advances (particularly on miniaturized semiconductor devices and nanoscale objects) have made it possible to envisage practical applications of plasma physics where the quantum nature of the particles plays a crucial role. Here, I shall review different approaches to the modeling of quantum effects in electrostatic collisionless plasmas. The full kinetic model is provided by the Wigner equation, which is the quantum analog of the Vlasov equation. The Wigner formalism is particularly attractive, as it recasts quantum mechanics in the familiar classical phase space, although this comes at the cost of dealing with negative distribution functions. Equivalently, the Wigner model can be expressed in terms of $N$ one-particle Schr{\"o}dinger equations, coupled by Poisson's equation: this is the Hartree formalism, which is related to the `multi-stream' approach of classical plasma physics. In order to reduce the complexity of the above approaches, it is possible to develop a quantum fluid model by taking velocity-space moments of the Wigner equation. Finally, certain regimes at large excitation energies can be described by semiclassical kinetic models (Vlasov-Poisson), provided that the initial ground-state equilibrium is treated quantum-mechanically. The above models are validated and compared both in the linear and nonlinear regimes.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c4bdf371290fd82a65098488ad04ea8308726cc
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Ab initio simulation of warm dense matter (2019, methodology): “[211] Fernando Haas and Shahzad Mahmood, “Linear and nonlinear ion-acoustic waves in nonrelativistic quantum plasmas with arbitrary degeneracy,” Phys.”
- Quantum Hydrodynamics (2013, background): “For instance, the QHD equations have been developed to study the dynamics of the quantum electron gas in metals and thin metal films [45, 46, 47, 48, 49].”
- Theoretical foundations of quantum hydrodynamics for plasmas (2017, methodology): “The factors ᾱ and γ in the equation for the Fermi pressure and the Bohm potential have been derived consistently connecting the linear density response function in the RPA to the Thomas-Fermi theory complemented by the first order density gradient correction This goes substantially beyond many previ”