Speaker
Description
The properties, such as equation of state, electrical and thermal conductivity, of warm dense matter is an emerging area of study that applies to the astrophysics of gas giants; to the early stages of ICF capsule implosion; to the initial process of wire or foil cylinder explosions and to the formation of surface plasmas on conductors under fast rising high current densities.
“Warm-dense matter” (WDM) includes conditions near solid density (from 10% of solid density to slightly above solid density) and modest temperatures (~1-10 eV) and has properties that differ from both condensed matter and traditional plasmas. Warm dense matter conditions can be achieved by laser or particle beam heating of very small quantities of matter on timescales short compared to the subsequent hydrodynamic expansion timescales (isochoric heating) and a vigorous community of researchers have applied these techniques but the microscopic size scale of the WDM produced in this way limits access to many continuum physics properties.
Pulsed power techniques to generate significant quantities of longer-lived WDM include: liner compression of modest density, low temperature plasma to densities approaching solid density, the explosion and subsequent expansion of a conductor (wire) against a high pressure (density) gas background (isobaric expansion), explosion of (non-imploding) foil cylinders confined by material with well-known EOS, and shock compression of low density porous materials (foams). If very large amounts of electrical energy are available, heating and confinement of initially solid samples by high velocity liner impact seems conceptually possible as well.
At modest energy scales, systems like the Pulsed High Energy Liner eXperiment (PHELX) can access WDM conditions using several approaches. In this paper we will provide a review of PHELIX-based techniques that might be applied to explore this interesting new application of pulse power and high magnetic field technology.
