Calculation of ionization balance and electrical conductivity in nonideal aluminum plasma

A practical approach has been implemented to calculate the ionization balance and electrical conductivity of warm dense aluminum plasma with the Coulomb coupling effect taken into account. The correction term for ionization potential is formulated with a number of basic dimensionless parameters that characterize nonideal plasma and incorporated with the fitted formulas of excess free energy given by Tanaka, Mitake, and Ichimaru [Phys. Rev. A 32, 1896 (1985)] and Chabrier and Potekhin [Phys. Rev. E 58, 4941 (1998)] to determine the ionization balance in an equilibrium state. The calculated degree of ionization of aluminum plasma exhibits a sudden increase near the solid density approximately 1 g/cm(3) at temperatures of a few eV, which effectively demonstrates the pressure-induced ionization. The electrical conductivity is evaluated in a partially ionized plasma regime based on a linear mixture rule that takes into account both the electron-ion and electron-neutral collisions and then the computed results are compared with available data from recent experiments. It is shown that the calculation well reproduces the overall trend of measured electrical conductivity of nonideal aluminum plasma accounting for the metal-insulator transition.