High Energy Laser Platforms for High Pressure Equation of State Measurements

Summary form only given. High energy laser facilities such as OMEGA, and the future NIF and LMJ provide an unprecedented capability to generate steady, planar, ultra-high pressure shock waves (>2 TPa) in solid samples. Building on successful laser shock EOS experiments performed on a variety of laser facilities, we are designing experiments to perform impedance match experiments on Cu at 2.3 TPa. The experiments will use a line-imaging VISAR as the primary diagnostic to measure the shock velocity in an Al reference standard and in a stepped Cu sample. Current designs are based on driving a steady shock for 1-2 ns with smooth planar breakout patterns over a 400 mum diameter spot. We expect to attain measurement accuracies approaching 1% for all velocity measurements, leading to ~5% accuracy in the compression for a single shot datum. Accuracies can be improved with statistical averaging over several shots, and should produce data with less than 3% density uncertainty. The accuracy of impedance match data also depends on systematic uncertainties in the Al standard; propagation of systematic errors is being analyzed and will be discussed