Calculation of Free-Free Opacities
Free-free absorption is an important contribution to the opacity for radiation transport through hot materials Temperatures can be as high as several keV, such that it becomes a computational challenge to solve the Schrodinger equation efficiently for rapidly oscillating continuum functions for high angular momenta. Several groups\footnots, including ours, have studied the phase amplitude solution (PAS) of the Schrodinger equation, in which one solves equations for the wave function amplitude and phase, which are: smooth functions of the electron energy. It is also important to have an accurate Schroudinger benchmark for the development of the PAS method. We present results for dipole matrix elements, Gaunt factors, and cross sections for the absorption of radiation at various energies for Cs XIX at temperature=100 eV and density=0.187 g/cc for our newly developed PAS and Schrodinger benchmark.