Shock-compression ultrapressure research

Abstract

Shock compression is used to achieve dynamic ultrapressures over an extremely wide range. One of the principal advantages of the dynamic method is that the high pressures, densities, and internal energies achieved are determined simply by the conservation of mass, momentum, and energy. Diagnostic techniques have been developed to measure the properties of materials at high dynamic pressure during the experimental lifetime, which is generally less than 1 ..mu..s. Shock compression is an irreversible process accompanied by heating, which must be taken into account in the analysis of experimental data and in relating shock-compression data to states achieved by static compression methods. The purpose of this paper is to describe briefly the phenomenology of shock compression, to discuss how shock data for metals have been used to generate the pressure scales for all static-compression experiments above -- 5 GPa, and to describe ways in which shock compression might potentially be used to synthesize andor process into useful form novel materials like the new high-T/sub c/ superconducting oxides.