Modified Enskog Kinetic Theory for Strongly Coupled Plasmas

Abstract

Concepts underlying the Enskog kinetic theory of hard-spheres are applied to include short-range correlation effects in a model for transport coefficients of strongly coupled plasmas. The approach is based on an extension of the effective potential transport theory [S.~D.~Baalrud and J.~Daligault, Phys.~Rev.~Lett.~{\bf 110}, 235001 (2013)] to include an exclusion radius surrounding individual charged particles that is associated with Coulomb repulsion. This is obtained by analogy with the finite size of hard spheres in Enskog's theory. Predictions for the self-diffusion and shear viscosity coefficients of the one-component plasma are tested against molecular dynamics simulations. The theory is found to accurately capture the kinetic contributions to the transport coefficients, but not the potential contributions that arise at very strong coupling ($\Gamma \gtrsim 30$). Considerations related to a first-principles generalization of Enskog's kinetic equation to continuous potentials are also discussed.