The one-component plasma: a conceptual approach

The one-component plasma (OCP) represents the simplest statistical mechanical model of a Coulomb system. For this reason, it has been extensively studied over the last 40 years. The advent of the integral equations has resulted in a dramatic improvement in our ability to carry out numerical calculations, but came at the expense of a physical insight gained in a simpler analytic theory. In this paper we present an extension of the Debye–Hückel (DH) theory to the OCP. The theory allows for analytic calculations of all the thermodynamic functions, as well as the structure factor. The theory explicitly satisfies the Stillinger–Lovett and, for small couplings, the compressibility sum rules, implying its internal self consistency.