Materials science under extreme conditions of pressure and strain rate

Solid-state dynamics experiments at very high pressures and strain rates are becoming possible with high-power laser facilities, albeit over brief intervals of time and spatially small scales. To achieve extreme pressures in the solid state requires that the sample be kept cool, with T _sample<T _melt. To this end, a shockless, plasma-piston “drive” has been developed on the Omega laser, and a staged shock drive was demonstrated on the Nova laser. To characterize the drive, velocity interferometer measurements allow the high pressures of 10 to 200 GPa (0.1 to 2 Mbar) and strain rates of 10⁶ to 10⁸ s⁻¹ to be determined. Solid-state strength in the sample is inferred at these high pressures using the Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability as a “diagnostic.” Lattice response and phase can be inferred for single-crystal samples from time-resolved X-ray diffraction. Temperature and compression in polycrystalline samples can be deduced from extended X-ray absorption fine-structure (EXAFS) measurements. Deformation mechanisms and residual melt depth can be identified by examining recovered samples. We will briefly review this new area of laser-based materials-dynamics research, then present a path forward for carrying these solid-state experiments to much higher pressures, P>10³ GPa (10 Mbar), on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This article is based on an invited presentation given in the symposium “Dynamic Deformation: Constitutive Modeling, Grain Size, and Other Effects: In Honor of Prof. Ronald W. Armstrong,” March 2–6, 2003, at the 2003 TMS/ASM Annual Meeting, San Diego, California, under the auspices of the TMS/ASM Joint Mechanical Behavior of Materials Committee.