Compression of a cylindrical hydrogen sample driven by an intense co-axial heavy ion beam

The compression of a cryogenic hydrogen cylindrical sample contained in a hollow gold target driven by an intense co-axial uranium beam has been studied. The ion distribution is assumed to be Gaussian in space and parabolic in time. The hydrodynamics of the target is analyzed by means of one- and two-dimensional numerical simulations. A parametric study is performed to achieve the maximum average hydrogen density and temperature as a function of the sample radius, total number of ions and spread of the spatial ion distribution. A window in the beam-target parameters for which hydrogen compression is higher than a factor of 10 and temperature is below 0.2 eV has been found by considering a single bunch that contains 2 × 10 ¹¹ uranium ions delivered in 100 ns. In this range of high densities and low temperatures, it is expected that hydrogen may become metallic.