Radiative opacity of gold plasmas studied by a detailed level-accounting method

Abstract

There are systematic discrepancies unexplained so far between theory and experiment for opacities of mid- and high- Z plasmas. To address this issue, we investigated the radiative opacity of gold plasmas by using a detailed level-accounting (DLA) method, in which various physical effects can be taken into account. In this work, we studied in detail the effects of core-valence electron correlation and linewidth on the opacity of gold plasmas. Our DLA results correctly explain the relative intensity of the two strong absorption peaks located near the photon energies of 70 and 80eV , which was experimentally observed by Eidmann [Europhys. Lett. 44, 459 (1998)]. Meanwhile, the DLA results showed that effects of saturation for the strong individual lines are evident in the transmission spectrum.