Ionization-potential depression and other dense plasma statistical property studies - Application to spectroscopic diagnostics

The radiative properties of an emitter surrounded by a plasma, are modi fi ed through various mechanisms. For instance the line shapes emitted by bound-bound transitions are broadened and carry useful information for plasma diagnostics. Depending on plasma conditions the electrons occupying the upper quantum levels of radiators no longer exist as they belong to the plasma free electron population. All the charges present in the radiator environment contribute to the lowering of the energy required to free an electron in the fundamental state. This mechanism is known as ionization potential depression (IPD). The knowledge of IPD is useful as it a ff ects both the radiative properties of the various ionic states and their populations. Its evaluation deals with highly complex n-body coupled systems, involving particles with di ff erent dynamics and attractive ion-electron forces. A classical molecular dynamics (MD) code, the BinGo-TCP code, has been recently developed to simulate neutral multi-component (various charge state ions and electrons) plasma accounting for all the charge correlations. In the present work, results on IPD and other dense plasma statistical properties obtained using the BinGo-TCP code are presented. The study focuses on aluminum plasmas for di ff erent densities and several temperatures in order to explore di ff erent plasma coupling conditions.