The precise description of temperature relaxation in dense two-temperature plasmas remains a formidable challenge in high-energy-density physics, particularly due to the complex interplay of quantum degeneracy, strong ion correlations, and collective excitations. In this work, we present a quantum kinetic approach for effectively modeling electron–ion energy transfer. Our method incorporates the coupled mode (CM) effects arising from collective excitations via the ionic acoustic dispersion relation, and explicitly includes ion correlation effects through the static structure factor. The obtained results are in good agreement with existing CM calculations that include local field corrections. This indicates that our framework yields a description of energy relaxation in strongly coupled regimes that is comparable to these established methods. We find reasonable agreement between our model and molecular dynamics simulations for hydrogen plasmas. Additionally, an analysis of entropy production during relaxation confirms thermodynamic consistency across models while revealing differences in instantaneous entropy production rates, providing a fundamental check for nonequilibrium plasma studies. The presented model offers a physically insightful and computationally efficient tool for predicting temperature relaxation, with direct relevance to inertial confinement fusion and laboratory astrophysics.
Thermodynamic and kinetic properties of hot nonideal plasmas