Modeling Materials at Extreme Conditions for High Energy-Density Science

Modern High Energy-Density experimental facilities study inertial confinement fusion, laboratory astrophysics, and extreme states of matter by compressing energy in space and time to produce hot, dense, and strongly coupled plasmas. In such extreme environments, changes in electronic and ionic structure impact the material equation-of-state, transport properties, and observable signatures that inform both hydrodynamic simulations and interpretations of experimental data. This talk will survey experimental programs in HED science and describe an ongoing effort to develop a highly constrained, fully self-consistent atomic-scale model of material at extreme conditions. Generating equations of state, transport properties (thermal and electrical conductivities, opacities, stopping powers) and diagnostic signatures (X-ray Thomson scattering, spectroscopic line shifts and broadening) from a single, consistent core model helps to constrain simulations and improve the reliability of data interpretation from complex experiments.