Emission spectra of Warm Dense Matter plasmas

The Warm Dense Matter (WDM) regime is a highly transient state of material between cold and hot plasmas. Understanding the optical and thermodynamic properties of rapidly expanding WDM plasmas is important to conducting experiments at the National Ignition Facility, since ignition targets may stay a relatively long time in this transient WDM regime. The computation of radiative properties of WDM poses several challenges. The main influence of density effects on atoms and ions in a highly-coupled WDM plasma is lowering of their ionization potential, modification of energy levels and broadening of spectral lines. The accurate calculations of ionization balance, ion charge-state distributions and atomic level populations are fundamental for determination of WDM opacities.