Proton stopping in plasmas considering e--e- collisions

The purpose of the present paper is to describe the effects of electron-electron collisions on proton electronic stopping in plasmas of any degeneracy. Plasma targets are considered fully ionized so electronic stopping is only due to the free electrons. The stopping due to free electrons is obtained from an exact quantum mechanical evaluation in the random phase approximation, which takes into account the degeneracy of the target plasma. The result is compared with common classical and degenerate approximations. Differences are around 30% in some cases which can produce bigger mistakes in further energy deposition and projectile range studies. We focus our analysis on plasmas in the limit of weakly coupled plasmas then electron-electron collisions have to be considered. Differences with the same results without taking into account collisions are more than 50%.