Effect of radiation on compressibility of hot dense sodium and iron plasma using improved screened hydrogenic model with l splitting

High pressure investigations of matter involve the study of strong shock wave dynamics within the materials which gives rise to many thermal effects leading to dissociation of molecules, ionization of atoms, and radiation emission, etc. The response of materials experiencing a strong shock can be determined by its shock Hugoniot calculations which are frequently applied in numerical and experimental studies in inertial confinement fusion, laboratory astrophysical plasma, etc. These studies involve high energy density plasmas in which the radiation plays an important role in determining the energy deposition and maximum compressibility achieved by the shock within material. In this study, we present an investigation for the effect of radiation pressure on the maximum compressibility of the material using shock Hugoniot calculations. In shock Hugoniot calculations, an equation of state (EOS) is developed in which electronic contributions for EOS calculations are taken from an improved screened hydrogenic model with −l splitting (I-SHML) [High Energy Density Physics (2018) 26 48] under local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) conditions. The thermal ionic part calculations are adopted from the state of the art Cowan model while the cold ionic contributions are adopted from the scaled binding energy model. The Shock Hugoniot calculations are carried out for sodium and iron plasmas and our calculated results show excellent agreement with published results obtained by using either sophisticated self-consistent models or the first principle study.