Theory of the electron-ion temperature relaxation rate spanning the hot solid metals and plasma phases

Abstract

We present a theory for the rate of energy exchange between electrons and ions -- also known as the electron-ion coupling factor -- in physical systems ranging from hot solid metals to plasmas, including liquid metals and warm dense matter. The paper provides the theoretical foundations of a recent work [J. Simoni and J. Daligault, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 122}, 205001 (2019)], where first-principles quantum molecular dynamics calculations based on this theory were presented for representative materials and conditions. We first derive a general expression for the electron-ion coupling factor that includes self-consistently the quantum mechanical and statistical nature of electrons, the thermal and disorder effects, and the correlations between particles. We show that our theory reduces to well-known models in limiting cases. In particular, we show that it simplifies to the standard electron-phonon coupling formula in the limit of hot solids with lattice and electronic temperatures much greater than the Debye temperature, and that it extends the electron-phonon coupling formula beyond the harmonic phonon approximation. For plasmas, we show that the theory readily reduces to well-know Spitzer formula in the hot plasma limit, to the Fermi golden rule formula in the limit of weak electron-ion interactions, and to other models proposed to go beyond the latter approximation. We explain that the electron-ion coupling is particularly well adapted to averaged atom models, which offer an effective way to include non-ideal interaction effects to the standard models and at a much reduced computational cost in comparison to first-principles quantum molecular dynamics simulations.