NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS AND THEORETICAL-ANALYSIS OF PROPOSED HEAVY-ION-MATTER EXPERIMENTS AT THE GSI DARMSTADT ACCELERATOR FACILITY

This paper presents one- and two-dimensional computer simulations of t he hydrodynamic response of solid cylindrical targets made of differen t materials that are irradiated by intense beams of energetic ions. Th e beam parameters considered in this study correspond to the design pa rameters of the heavy ion beam that will be produced at the Gesellscha ft fur Schwerionenforschung (GSI), Darmstadt heavy ion synchrotron fac ility (SIS) in 1999. A few calculations, however, were also done using the beam parameters that are currently available at the SIS. Differen t values for specific energy deposition including 1, 10, 50, and 100 k J/g, respectively, have been considered, whereas a number of different pulse lengths, namely, 10, 50, 100, and 200 ns, have been assumed. Va rious target materials, for example, solid lead, solid neon, and solid hydrogen, have been used. It is expected that this simulation study w ill be very helpful in the design of efficient targets for the future experiments at the GSI. These experiments will hopefully provide very useful information about many important basic physics phenomena, such as enhanced energy loss of heavy ions in hot dense plasmas, equation-o f state (EOS) of matter under extreme conditions, material opacity and shock wave propagation. Another very interesting experiment with impo rtant practical implications that could be done at this facility may b e the creation of metallic hydrogen by imploding appropriately designe d multilayered targets containing a layer of frozen hydrogen. This pap er presents the design of such a target, together with implosion simul ations of this target using a hydrodynamic simulation model. These sim ulations show that it may be possible to compress the frozen hydrogen to achieve the theoretically predicted physical conditions necessary f or hydrogen metallization (a density of the order of 1 to 2 g/cm(3), a temperature of a few 0.1 eV and a pressure of about 2-5 megabar). In some cases, compression of frozen deuterium was also studied. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics. [S1070-664X(98)04912-X].