Development of dynamic compression at the ESRF

Static compression, mainly based on the diamond anvil cell, has a longstanding tradition at the ESRF, the first experiment having been performed fore than 20 years ago. This allows to investigate different phenomena in the matter up to few Mbar range, involving several applications such as novel materials, chemistry, geophysics and fundamental science.

Recently there are novel interests from the scientific community to go on one side to more extreme conditions - beyond the limit of static compression, for example to mimic conditions of the exoplanets - and on the other side to investigate the matter at higher strain rate, down to the 10⁹ s^-1 range, i.e. to understand industrial processes.  These two fields could be addressed by dynamic compression using powerful lasers.

In the last few years, first experiments coupling high-power lasers (or gas-guns) to x-rays have been performed at the ESRF using different techniques: XAS, XRD and XRI. As an example, using a portable 30 J laser warm dense Fe was probed by XAS on ID24 up to 500 GPa and 17000 K in May 2014. The whole high pressure community was positively surprised by the high quality of the data achievable with a single x-ray pulse at a synchrotron beamline. This experiment demonstrated outstanding opportunities for future developments in this direction at synchrotron sources, because the conditions are met to finally address the grand challenge of dynamical compression, i.e. to obtain an atomistic understanding of the thermodynamical and constitutive properties of shocked matter, and of some dynamical phenomena.

In this talk some results from these first demonstrative experiments will be shown, as well as new ideas for future experiments to be performed with the new laser facility that will be installed on the dispersive XAS beamline ID24.