A search for manifestation of two types of collective excitations in dynamic structure of a liquid metal: Ab initio study of collective excitations in liquid Na.

Using a combination of ab initio molecular dynamics and several fit models for dynamic structure of liquid metals, we explore an issue of possible manifestation of non-acoustic collective excitations in longitudinal dynamics having liquid Na as a case study. A model with two damped harmonic oscillators (DHOs) in time domain is used for analysis of the density-density time correlation functions. Another similar model with two propagating contributions and three lowest exact sum rules is considered, as well as an extended hydrodynamic model known as thermo-viscoelastic one which permits two types of propagating modes outside the hydrodynamic region to be used for comparison with ab initio obtained time correlation functions and calculations of dispersions of collective excitations. Our results do not support recent suggestions that, even in simple liquid metals, non-hydrodynamics transverse excitations contribute to the longitudinal collective dynamics and can be detected as a DHO-like spectral shape at their transverse frequency. We found that the thermo-viscoelastic dynamic model permits perfect description of the density-density and current-current time correlation functions of the liquid Na in a wide range of wave numbers, which implies that the origin of the non-hydrodynamic collective excitations contributing to longitudinal dynamics can be short-wavelength heat waves.