Description
Session Chair: Tobias Dornheim
The particle-in-cell method is central to providing a kinetic description of the relativstic, nonlinear plasma dynamics -- particularly when interacting with ultrashort laser pulses and particle beams. Its broad applicability ranges from advanced plasma accelerators of electrons or ions, warm dense matter to astrophysics. A major challenge to a better understanding is to integrate disparate...
Recently, our group suggested an alternative approach to standard DFT calculations. In CP-DFT, we use Kohn-Sham calculations to find conditional probability densities at every point in a system. These are then integrated to yield the exchange-correlation energy, thereby avoiding the need (and many of the failures) to find the energy via an approximate functional. We found that we could...
Finite-Temperature Density Functional Theory (FT-DFT) has played a significant role in the study of warm dense matter over the past few decades. However, modern FT-DFT calculations typically make use of ground-state approximations to the exchange-correlation (XC) free energy, ignoring its temperature dependence. While overall the ground-state approximation is valid in both the low- and...
