Shock compression of condensed matter using intense beams of energetic heavy ions

In this paper is presented, with the help of sophisticated two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations, a suitable design with optimized parameters for a heavy-ion beam-matter interaction experiment that will be carried out at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) Darmstadt by the end of the year 2001 when the upgrade of the existing accelerator facility will be completed. Our simulations show that this upgraded heavy-ion beam is capable of generating strong shocks in solid targets that compress the target material to supersolid densities and generate multi-mbar pressures. This will open up, at the GSI, the possibility of investigation of the equation-of-state properties of matter under such extreme conditions. Numerical simulations can predict the experimental results with reasonable accuracy, which is helpful in designing the diagnostic tools for the experiment.