Ab initio calculation of electron - ion temperature relaxation in dense plasmas

The last ten years have seen tremendous progress in our ability to
form and probe well-controlled warm dense matter conditions in the
laboratory thanks to better drivers and diagnostics.
By their nature, warm dense matter experiments produce transient,
non-equilibrium conditions, and measurements of equilibrium properties
may be misleading if recorded while the plasma species are still out of equilibrium.
Here we consider the electron-ion temperature relaxation rate in dense plasmas
Previous evaluations based on theoretical models have shown strong disagreement between each other.
In this work, we compute the temperature relaxation rates using
ab-initio quantum molecular dynamics across a wide range of condiitons
for dense Aluminum and Hydrogen plasmas.