Conductivity of Nonideal Zinc and Carbon Plasmas - Experiments and Theoretical Results

In recent years it has become possible to produce and analyze dense, strongly coupled plasmas. In particular it was possible to determine transport properties. In this contribution we report on measurements of the electrical conductivity of nonideal zinc and carbon plasmas, which are produced by evaporating a wire placed in a capillary (exploding wire) within some hundred nanoseconds. The particle density is in the range of 1022 cm—3. The plasma temperature, which is obtained by fitting a Planck function to the measured spectrum, is between 8000 and 20000 K. We compare the measured electrical conductivies with theoretical results using quantum kinetic theory for partially ionized plasmas. Here, the transport cross sections are calculated in T-matrix approximation and the plasma composition of the nonideal plasma is determined by the solution of coupled mass action laws.