Equation of state and transport coefficients of warm dense aluminum from mixed deterministic-stochastic density functional theory

Abstract: Aluminum is a reference standard in high-energy-density research and serves as a liner material in megampere Z-pinch facilities. Using mixed deterministic-stochastic finite-temperature density functional theory, we compute the equation of state and transport coefficients of liquid aluminum up to temperatures of 1000 eV and compare the results with model-based approaches. We find that for T<200 eV the density-functional results differ from the models by more than 10% at high density, with a maximum deviation of over 30% (at T = 10 eV), leading to significant discrepancies in the Hugoniot curve at high compression; the calculated electrical and thermal conductivities deviate from model predictions by 26% to 63% at T~100 eV. We further employ the Drude model and the Epperlein-Haines framework to examine the magnetic-field dependence of the conductivities. These results can provide valuable input data for radiation-hydrodynamics codes.