Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Electron-Ion Temperature Equilibration in an SF6 Plasma

We use classical molecular dynamics to investigate electron-ion temperature equilibration in a two-temperature SF6 plasma. We choose a density of 1.0x10(19)SF(6) molecules per cm(3) and initial temperatures of T-e=100 eV and T-S=T-F=15 eV, in accordance with experiments currently underway at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Our computed relaxation time lies between two oft-used variants of the Landau-Spitzer relaxation formula which invoke static screening. Discrepancies are also found when comparing to the predictions made by more recent theoretical approaches. These differences should be large enough to be measured in the upcoming experiments.