Experiments on extreme states of matter towards HIF at FAIR

Abstract

The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe (FAIR) will provide worldwide unique accelerator and experimental facilities allowing for a large variety of unprecedented frontier research in extreme state of matter physics and applied science. Indeed, it is the largest basic research project on the roadmap of the European Strategy Forum of Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), and it is cornerstone of the European Research Area. FAIR offers to scientists from the whole world an abundance of outstanding research opportunities, broader in scope than any other contemporary large-scale facility worldwide. More than 2500 scientists are involved in setting up and exploiting the FAIR facility. They will push the frontiers of our knowledge in plasma, nuclear, atomic, hadron and applied physics far ahead, with important implications also for other fields in science such as cosmology, astro and particle physics, and technology. It includes 14 initial experiments, which form the four scientific pillars of FAIR. The main thrust of intense heavy ion and laser beam-matter interaction research focuses on the structure and evolution of extreme state of matter on both a microscopic and on a cosmic scale. 1. INTERNATIONAL FAIR Construction of a new accelerator facility called FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) was started in 2010 as an international research project in Darmstadt, Germany. This new accelerator complex will consist of two powerful heavy ion synchrotrons and a number of storage rings and experimental facilities for various research projects (1, 2). The centrepiece of the accelerator assembly will be a 100Tm superconducting heavy ion synchrotron SIS-100 (see Fig. 1). FAIR will provide compressed beam pulses with an intensity that exceeds the current beam intensities by two orders of magnitude. This will extend the available beam deposition power from the current level of 10GW/g by at least two orders of magnitude up to 3TW/g. Many aspects of high power beam physics associated with inertial confinement fusion driven by intense heavy ion beams will be addressed there, even though this facility will not provide enough beam power to ignite a fusion pellet (3). Due to the unique feature of the energy deposition of heavy ions in dense matter—volume character of heating—it is possible to generate extreme states of matter that cannot be accessed with other drivers. This will open up the possibility to explore the thermo-physical and transport properties of high energy density (HED) matter in a regime that is very difficult to access using the traditional methods of shock compression (4).