MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION OF A LOW-DENSITY ARGON PLASMA

Energy relations prevailing in the argon plasma have been investigated. Considering the plasma as a canonical ensemble, the Monte Carlo method could be applied. In this way, the components of plasma energy: the Lennard-Jones interaction, the Coulomb interaction and the ion-polarisable atom interaction were determined. The Coulomb energy of the Monte Carlo calculation was compared with the results of the simple Debye-Huckel and MSA theories. A good agreement was found for the different kinds of energies calculated. The calculations were performed on an IBM 386 PC computer (25 MHz, with coprocessor). The calculation of a result (with 100000 Monte Carlo steps and 365 particles) required approximately 48 hours runtime.