The creation of strongly coupled plasmas using an intense heavy ion beam: Low-entropy compression of hydrogen and the problem of hydrogen metallization

Intense heavy ion beams deposit energy very efficiently over extended volumes of solid density targets, thereby creating large samples of strongly coupled plasmas. Intense beams of energetic heavy ions are therefore an ideal tool to research this interesting field. It is also possible to design experiments using special beam-target geometries to achieve low-entropy compression of samples of matter. This type of experiments is of particular interest for studying the problem of hydrogen metallization. In this paper we present a design study of such a proposed experiment that will be carried out at the future heavy ion synchrotron facility SIS 100, at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt. This study has been done using a two-dimensional hydrodynamic computer code. The target consists of a solid hydrogen cylinder that is enclosed in a thick shell of lead whose one face is irradiated with an ion beam which has an annular (ring shaped) focal spot. The beam intensity and other parameters are considered to be the same as expected at the future SIS 100 facility. The simulations show that due to multiple shock reflection between the cylinder axis and the lead-hydrogen boundary, one can achieve up to 20 times solid density in hydrogen while keeping the temperature as low as a few thousand K. The corresponding pressure is of the order of 10 Mbar. These values of the physical parameters lie within the range of theoretically predicted values for hydrogen metallization. We have also carried out a parameter study of this problem by varying the target and beam parameters-over a wide range. It has been found that the results are very insensitive to such changes in the input parameters.