High-Pressure, Solid-State Experiments for NIF

In this report, we summarize our plan for using NIF for measuring solid-state deformation physics at very high pressures, P >> 1 Mbar. There are several key uncertainties, the strength and phase being two of them. The deformation mechanisms at high pressure and high strain rate are also uncertain. The state, as well as strength, of a material that has first been melted, then dynamically refrozen by high-pressure compression is very uncertain. There is no single facility that can address all of these issues at all parameter regimes of interest. Rather, a coordinated plan involving multiple laboratories and universities and multiple facilities will ultimately be needed. We present here our first thoughts for the NIF component of this effort. In Sec. I, we motivate the physics of this regime, and point out the uncertainties, then describe in Sec. II the development work that we have done over the last 5 years in this area. In Sec. III, we describe several NIF designs we have developed to probe solid-state deformation physics at very high pressures.