Berkeley Lab's NDCX-II, the recently completed second generation Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment, is a compact accelerator whose dense ion beam will be able to deliver a powerful punch for producing warm dense matter – a step on the road to heavy-ion nuclear fusion.
The copper-clad component resembles a spyglass and produces a plasma that focuses the accelerator beam down to a point that can heat a spot of foil to 30,000 degrees Celsius in less than a billionth of a second to create a substance called warm dense matter that researchers are eager to study.
The research could benefit studies in other areas as well, such as investigations of warm dense matter – a state of matter between a solid and a plasma that exists in the cores of certain planets and is also important in the pursuit of nuclear fusion with high-power lasers.
To observe the warm dense matter, a pulsed-power generator based on a pulse-forming-network (PFN) was studied toward generating an intense point-spot-like X-ray source from X-pinch technique.
The objective of designing such a non standard approach to plasma equilibrium is to explore a new way to discuss warm and dense matter with a method able to deal with the whole complexity of a N-body system of ions and electrons.
Integrated LSP simulations that include modeling of the diode, magnetic transport, induction bunching module, plasma neutralized transport, solenoidal focusing and beam target interaction, are assisting in the design of a near-term warm dense matter experiment.
The Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy-Ion Fusion Science is developing a physics design for NDCX-II, an experiment to study warm dense matter heated by ions near the Bragg-peak energy.
The proposed technique yields the electrical conductivity of warm dense matter with a well-defined temperature.
Traveling at nearly the speed of light, those nuclei were smashed into a lead foil, producing hot, dense matter in the collisions.
Our analytical and numerical findings lead us to conjecture a new state of cold, but dense matter in the hadronic phase for which Fermi Einstein condensation is realized.
In 2005, the experiment made the surprising discovery that the extraordinarily hot and dense matter that filled the universe a few millionths of a second after the big bang was not a gaseous plasma but instead a \ perfect liquid\" that flowed 100 times more easily than water.
