Recreating core states of giant planets in the laboratory

A new generation of ultra-dense materials experiments is underway thanks to a variety of new compression and diagnostic capabilities developed to produce inertially confined fusion in the laboratory. We can now recreate the dense material states that exist in the deepest interior of a Giant planet and the hot-dense plasmas that exist in stars like our sun, in the laboratory. Recent experiments show that materials compressed to even a fraction of such pressures have somewhat exotic properties. For example, helium becomes a metal at 2.5 g/cc, the diamond melting temperature is nearly flat with pressure out to 1 TPa (1,000 gigaPascals or 107 atmospheres), dense fluid carbon is polymeric up to 2 TPa, and Aluminum is super strong when ramp compressed to 100 GPa in a nanosecond. Over the next few years, these capabilities will allow us to explore the nature of solids to several TPa, complex chemistry to 100 TPa, and the nature of helium and hydrogen in the deep interior of Jupiter.