Rapid heating of matter using high power lasers

Abstract

On the Trident laser facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we have used a beam of laser-driven quasi-monoenergetic aluminum ions [1] to heat solid density gold and diamond foils uniformly and rapidly above 10,000 K [2]. Although matter at such an extreme state, known as warm dense matter, is commonly found in astrophysics (e.g., in planetary cores) as well as in high energy density physics experiments, its properties are difficult to predict theoretically and are not well understood. A sufficiently large warm dense matter sample that is uniformly heated would be ideal for these studies, but has been unavailable to date.

I. RESULTS Figure 1 shows the schematic layout of the experimental setup. For the first time, we visualized directly the expanding warm dense gold and diamond plasmas with an optical streak camera [3]. We developed a new technique to determine the initial temperature of these heated samples from the measured expansion speeds of gold and diamond into vacuum [4]. We anticipate the uniformly heated solid density target will allow for direct quantitative measurements of equation-of-state, conductivity, opacity, and stopping power of warm dense matter, benefiting plasma physics, astrophysics, and nuclear physics. This presentation was supported by NRF-2018R1C1B6001580.