Publications

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The noble gas xenon is a particularly interesting element. At standard pressure xenon is an fcc solid which melts at 161 K and then boils at 165 K, thus displaying a rather narrow liquid range on the phase diagram. On the other hand, under pressure the melting point is significantly higher: 3000 K at 30 GPa. Under shock compression, electronic excitations become important at 40 GPa. Finally, xenon forms stable molecules with fluorine (XeF{sub 2}) suggesting that the electronic structure is significantly more complex than expected for a noble gas. With these reasons in mind, we studied the xenon Hugoniot using DFT/QMD and validated the simulations with multi-Mbar shock compression experiments. The results show that existing equation of state models lack fidelity and so we developed a wide-range free-energy based equation of state using experimental data and results from first-principles simulations.

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Xenon is not only a technologically important element used in laser technologies and jet propulsion, but it is also one of the most accessible materials in which to study the metal-insulator transition with increasing pressure. Because of its closed shell electronic configuration, xenon is often assumed to be chemically inert, interacting almost entirely through the van der Waals interaction, and at liquid density, is typically modeled well using Leonard-Jones potentials. However, such modeling has a limited range of validity as xenon is known to form compounds under normal conditions and likely exhibits considerably more chemistry at higher densities when hybridization of occupied orbitals becomes significant. We present DFT-MD simulations of shocked liquid xenon with the goal of developing an improved equation of state. The calculated Hugoniot to 2 MPa compares well with available experimental shock data. Sandia is a mul-tiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. © 2009 American Institute of Physics.

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