A study using Flash to design a radiative shock experiment using the ZEUS facility*

The ZEUS laser was developedis a high-intensity, ultrashort pulse laser facility  at the University of Michigan and willto study nonlinear quantum electrodynamics in relativistic plasmas. It will also have a long-pulse laser to that can drive create hydrodynamic shocks in the high-energy-density regime. We will use the Flash code to design a radiative shock experiment using different various gas densities and opacities to study the evolution of shocks in the radiative and non-radiative regimes. We will then demonstrate synthetic diagnostic images of the results using a betatron x-ray source created using ZEUS’s short pulse laser. This will show demonstrate how powerful a platform the versatility of ZEUS can be in creating and analyzing radiative shocks.