Nonideal effects on ionization potential depression and ionization balance in dense Al and Au plasmas.

For low-density plasmas, the ionization balance can be properly described by the normal Saha equation in the chemical picture. For dense plasmas, however, nonideal effects due to the interactions between the electrons and ions and among the electrons themselves affect the ionization potential depression and the ionization balance. With the increasing of plasma density, the pressure ionization starts to play a more obvious role and competes with the thermal ionization. Based on a local-density temperature-dependent ion-sphere model, we develop a unified and self-consistent theoretical formalism to simultaneously investigate the ionization potential depression, the ionization balance, and the charge states distributions of the dense plasmas. In this work, we choose Al and Au plasmas as examples as Al is a prototype light element and Au is an important heavy element in many research fields such as in the inertial confinement fusion. The nonideal effect of the free electrons in the plasmas is considered by the single-electron effective potential contributed by both the bound electrons of different charge states and the free electrons in the plasmas. For the Al plasmas, we can reconcile the results of two experiments on measuring the ionization potential depression, in which one experiment can be better explained by the Stewart-Pyatt model while the other fits better with the Ecker-Kröll model. For dense Au plasmas, the results show that the double peak structure of the charge state distribution appears to be a common phenomenon. In particular, the calculated ionization balance shows that the two- and three-peak structures can appear simultaneously for denser Au plasmas above ∼30g/cm^{3}.