Experiments on Materials at Extreme Conditions at High Power Laser Facilities

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Speaker(s): Alison M. Saunders

The field of High Energy Density Physics (HEDP) in an emerging field of physics that combines expertise from plasma and condensed matter physics to understand the behavior of materials at extreme conditions, such as those that exist at the center of the sun. Extreme conditions in the laboratory are generated through pressure applied statically or dynamically through shock compression. Lasers efficiently drive shocks into their samples, and high-power laser facilities offer flexible experimental configurations, high peak pressures, and accompanying advanced diagnostics suites, and as such, are ideal places to perform HEDP experiments. In this talk, I will discuss the science that can be accomplished at high power laser facilities and the National Ignition Facility, the laser present at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I will then discuss results from a recent set of experiments in which we took the first ever movies of interacting jets from shocked tin in order to better understand tin in extreme conditions. The results from these experiments serve to advance our understanding of novel material properties under compression.

Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series, held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. in Shanahan B460. The talks are open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.