Relaxation of strongly coupled Coulomb systems after rapid changes of the interaction potential

The relaxation of charged particle systems after sudden changes of the pair interaction strength is investigated. As examples, we show the results for plasmas after ionization and after a rapid change of screening. Comparisons are made between molecular dynamics simulation and a kinetic description based on the Kadanoff-Baym equations. We found the latter very sensitive to the way the scattering cross section is treated. We also predict the new equilibrium state requiring only conservation of energy. In this case, the correlation energy is computed using the hypernetted chain approximation.