REVIEW OF THE 3RD INTERNATIONAL OPACITY WORKSHOP AND CODE COMPARISON STUDY

The Third International Opacity Workshop and Code Comparison Study Work Op-III:94 was held in March 1994 at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Quantenoptik (MPQ) in Garching, Germany. The meeting was organized by A. Rickert, J. Meyer-ter-Vehn and K. Eidmann from MPQ with strong support from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, especially by F. J. D. Serduke and C. A. Iglesias. Twenty-one different codes participated in the comparison and results for up to 35 test cases with elements throughout the periodic table and two astrophysical mixtures were submitted prior to the meeting. There were 485 individual plasma calculations with about 150 Mbytes of information submitted. At the meeting, radiative opacities were compared in detail and differences in calculated results were traced back to the physics input such that their origin became transparent. A review of these comparisons is given and detailed comparisons for some of the test cases are presented.