Overview of warm-dense-matter experiments with intense heavy ion beams at gsi-darmstadt

This paper presents an overview of the warm-dense-matter physics experiments with intense heavy ion beams that has been carried out at the Gesellschaft fur Schwerionenforschung (GSI), Darmstadt, Germany. These experiments are a joint effort of GSI-Darmstadt, TU-Darmstadt, ITEP-Moscow, IPCP-Chernogolvka and LBNL-Berkeley. In the performed experiments, electron-cooled beam of ²³⁸U⁷³⁺ ions with initial ion energy of 350 AMeV has been used. The intense, up to 2.5 - 10⁹ ions/bunch, ion pulses have been compressed to 110 ns (FWHM) and focused at the target to a spot down to 150 mum diameter. The beam intensity and the pulse shape have been measured by current transformers installed in front of the target chamber whereas the upper limit for the focal spot size has been determined by recording beam-induced emission of argon gas at ionic spectral lines. It was shown that using intense heavy ion beam that is presently available at GSI and employing the HIHEX beam-target design concept, it is possible to investigate basic thermodynamic and transport properties of HED metal states in the two-phase liquid-gas region and near the critical point.