Studies of strongly coupled plasmas using intense heavy ion beams at the future FAIR facility: The HEDgeHOB collaboration

This paper shows with the help of numerical simulations that the high intensity bunched beam of uranium that will be available at the future FAIR (Facility for Antiprotons and Ion Research) facility [W.F. Henning, Nucl. Inst. Meth. B, 214 (2004) 211] at Darmstadt, will be a very efficient tool to create High-Energy-Density (HED) states in matter (including strongly coupled plasmas) in the laboratory. We have simulated hydrodynamic and thermodynamic response of targets made of different materials including aluminum and lead. These simulations have been carried out using a two-dimensional hydrodynamic computer code, BIG-2. Our simulations show that one can create a plasma with a plasma coupling parameter, Γ, of the order of 5. Such plasmas are believed to exist in stars, brown dwarfs and giant planets. Experimental study of such systems is therefore of great importance to our understanding of the universe. It has also been theoretically predicted that the stopping power of strongly coupled plasmas will be less than that of ideal plasmas. This could have very important implications for inertial confinement fusion energy production schemes.