High fidelity equation of state for xenon

The noble gas xenon is a particularly interesting element. At standard pres- sure xenon is an fcc solid which melts at 161 K and then boils at 165 K, thus displaying a rather narrow liquid range on the phase diagram. On the other hand, under pressure the melting point is significantly higher: 3000 K at 30 GPa (1). Under shock compression, electronic excitations become important at 40 GPa (2). Finally, xenon forms stable mole- cules with fluorine (XeF2) suggesting that the electronic structure is significantly more complex than expected for a noble gas. With these reasons in mind, we studied the xenon Hugoniot using DFT/QMD (3) and validated the simulations with multi-Mbar shock com- pression experiments. The results show that existing equation of state models lack fidelity and so we developed a wide-range free-energy based equation of state using experimental data and results from first-principles simulations.