EQUATION OF STATE OF FULLY IONIZED ELECTRON-ION PLASMAS

Thermodynamic quantities of Coulomb plasmas consisting of pointlike io ns immersed in a compressible, polarizable electron background are cal culated for ion charges Z=1-26 and for a wide domain of plasma paramet ers ranging from the Debye-Huckel limit to the crystallization point a nd from the region of nondegenerate to fully degenerate nonrelativisti c or relativistic electrons. The calculations are based on the linear- response theory for the electron-ion interaction, including the local- field corrections in the electronic dielectric function. The thermodyn amic quantities are calculated in the framework of the N-body hypernet ted-chain equations and fitted by analytic expressions. We present als o accurate analytic approximations for the free energy of the ideal el ectron gas at arbitrary degeneracy and relativity and for the excess f ree energy of the one-component plasma of ions derived from Monte Carl o simulations. The extension to multi-ionic mixtures is discussed with in the framework of the linear mixing rule. These formulas provide a c ompletely analytic, accurate description of the thermodynamic quantiti es of fully ionized electron-ion Coulomb plasmas, a useful tool for va rious applications from liquid state theory to dense stellar matter. [ S1063-651X(98)03410-2].