Modeling the radiative properties of dense plasmas

A model aimed at describing the electronic structure of hot dense plasmas is presented. This model is first used to study the effect of the nearest neighbor interaction on the photoabsorption K-edge position in a dense fluorine plasma. Changes to the ionization potential lowering from the well-known ion sphere model [H. Nguyen et al., Phys. Rev. A 33, 1279 (1986)] are obtained by the present approach for plasma density above solid. We believe that this effect could be of importance in the calculation of the opacity of dense materials. The present model also provides an alternative to the treatment of line broadening in very dense plasmas where the average interionic spacing can be of the order of the spatial extent of the excited-state orbitals. To illustrate this point, we present F Lyman-{β} line shapes for various density conditions.