Fig. 2: From PIMC to XRTS.
From: Unraveling electronic correlations in warm dense quantum plasmas
a Schematic illustration of our setup. The Be capsule is compressed and probed by an x-ray source (purple); the scattered photons (blue) are collected by a detector under an angle θ, which is defined as the angle between the purple and blue beams. We use the PIMC method to simulate the quantum degenerate interior of the capsule, allowing for unprecedented comparisons between theory and experiment; b XRTS spectra for θ = 120° (black, dataset #3 in ref. 11) and θ = 75° (red), and the source-and-instrument function (blue dashed); c, f PIMC results for See(q) (symbols) for ρ = 7.5 g/cc (red), ρ = 20 g/cc (green) and ρ = 30 g/cc (yellow) compared to the NIF data point (bold blue, with corresponding uncertainty) and random phase approximation (RPA) results (dotted lines); d, g ITCF Fee(q, τ) in the q-τ-plane, with the colored surface and dashed blue line corresponding to PIMC simulations for ρ = 20 g/cc and the Laplace transform of the NIF spectra; e, h τ-dependence of Fee(q, τ) at the probed wavenumber; the shaded blue area quantifies the experimental uncertainty. The center and bottom rows correspond to the θ = 120° and θ = 75° shots, for which we find T = 155.5 eV and T = 190 eV (see the vertical dotted lines in (e, h), respectively, see the Methods Section.
