ABSTRACT
This chapter considers application of a thermodynamic variational principle to a treatment of such an electron-ion effect, assuming that an adiabatic approximation may be applicable to coordinates of the electrons. A dense plasma material may be modeled as a two-component plasma constituted by electrons and ions. These constituents were treated individually as representatives for the classical and quantum charged systems. Atomic levels and their existence should be influenced strongly by the statistical properties of the dense plasmas. The strong electron-ion (e-i) coupling thus opens up new dimensions in the condensed plasma physics, where an outstanding issue will be an interplay between the atomic and molecular physics, and the plasma and condensed matter physics, on the other. The former may be classified as a few-particle physics, and the latter may belong to the class of many-particle physics. The strong coupling effects in dense plasmas have been studied theoretically by a number of investigators.
