Effective Potential Theory: A Practical Way to Extend Plasma Transport Theory to Strong Coupling

The effective potential theory is a physically motivated method for extending traditional plasma transport theories to stronger coupling. It is practical in the sense that it is easily incorporated within the framework of the Chapman‐Enskog or Grad methods that are commonly applied in plasma physics and it is computationally efficient to evaluate. The extension is to treat binary scatterers as interacting through the potential of mean force, rather than the bare Coulomb or Debye‐screened Coulomb potential. This allows for aspects of many‐body correlations to be included in the transport coefficients. Recent work has shown that this method accurately extends plasma theory to orders of magnitude stronger coupling when applied to the classical one‐component plasma model. The present work shows that similar accuracy is realized for the Yukawa one‐component plasma model and it provides a comparison with other approaches. (© 2015 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)