Fast models for warm dense matter

The study of warm dense matter (WDM) is critical to our understanding of many interesting scientific and technological phenomena, in particular various astrophysical applications, and inertial confinement fusion. To develop accurate models for WDM, one has to account for the quantum behaviour of electrons (and sometimes nuclei too) across a wide range of temperatures and densities, which presents a challenge for established modelling techniques. In our poster, we introduce the concept of an average-atom model, which accounts (partially) for these quantum interactions in a computationally efficient way. We show some example applications of average-atom models, to demonstrate their usefulness in the WDM regime. We also present atoMEC: an average-atom code for matter under extreme conditions, which is open-source and written in Python.