Gao CZ, Zhang CB, Cai Y, Wu Y, Fan ZF, Wang P, Wang JG. Assessment of the electron-proton energy relaxation rates extracted from molecular dynamics simulations in weakly-coupled hydrogen plasmas.
Phys Rev E 2023;
107:015203. [PMID:
36797881 DOI:
10.1103/physreve.107.015203]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/17/2022] [Accepted: 12/23/2022] [Indexed: 06/18/2023]
Abstract
Electron-proton energy relaxation rates are assessed using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in weakly-coupled hydrogen plasmas. To this end, we use various approaches to extract the energy relaxation rate from MD-simulated temperatures, and we find that existing extracting approaches may yield results with a sizable discrepancy larger than the variance between analytical models, which is further verified by well-known case studies. Present results show that two of the extracting approaches can produce identical results, which is attributed to a proper treatment of relaxation evolution. To discriminate the use of various methods, an empirical criterion with respect to initial plasma temperatures is proposed, which can self-consistently explain the cases considered. In addition, for a transient electron-proton plasma, we show that it is possible to extrapolate the Coulomb logarithm from that derived by initial plasma parameters in a single MD calculation, which is reasonably consistent with previous MD data. Our results are helpful to obtain accurate MD-based energy relaxation rates.
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