Numerical simulations and theoretical analysis of proposed heavy-ion-matter experiments at the GSI Darmstadt accelerator facility

摘要

This paper presents one- and two-dimensional computer simulations of the hydrodynamic response of solid cylindrical targets made of different materials that are irradiated by intense beams of energetic ions. The beam parameters considered in this study correspond to the design parameters of the heavy ion beam that will be produced at the Gesellschaft fur Schwerionenforschung (GSI), Darmstadt heavy ion synchrotron facility (SIS) in 1999. A few calculations, however, were also done using the beam parameters that are currently available at the SIS. Different values for specific energy deposition including 1, 10, 50, and 100 kJ/g, respectively, have been considered, whereas a number of different pulse lengths, namely, 10, 50, 100, and 200 ns, have been assumed. Various target materials, for example, solid lead, solid neon, and solid hydrogen, have been used. It is expected that this simulation study will be very helpful in the design of efficient targets for the future experiments at the GSI. These experiments will hopefully provide very useful information about many important basic physics phenomena, such as enhanced energy loss of heavy ions in hot dense plasmas, equation-of state (EOS) of matter under extreme conditions, material opacity and shock wave propagation. Another very interesting experiment with important practical implications that could be done at this facility may be the creation of metallic hydrogen by imploding appropriately designed multilayered targets containing a layer of frozen hydrogen. This paper presents the design of such a target, together with implosion simulations of this target using a hydrodynamic simulation model. These simulations show that it may be possible to compress the frozen hydrogen to achieve the theoretically predicted physical conditions necessary for hydrogen metallization (a density of the order of 1 to 2 g/cm(3), a temperature of a few 0.1 eV and a pressure of about 2-5 megabar). In some cases, compression of frozen deuterium was also studied. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics. [S1070-664X(98)04912-X]. [References: 53]