Atomic Structure in Strongly Coupled Neon Plasmas.

A self-consistent, completely quantum mechanical formalism has been developed that characterizes the fundamental atomic properties of ions in dense plasma. This theory is applied to neon plasmas under strongly-coupled conditions and the results are compared with those obtained from the hypernetted chain approximation employing a semiclassical two-body interaction. The comparisons point out the inappropriateness of Debye-Huckel and ion-sphere approximations for atomic calculations in strongly coupled plasmas and indicate that the self-consistent theory provides a method obtaining meaningful results when the plasma ion coupling parameter is of order five. Author