Ultrafast laboratory astrophysics and planetary physics with NSF-OPAL*

The Laboratory Astrophysics and Planetary Physics (LAPP) Flagship capability aims to examine materials under intense pressure, exploring a broad range of conditions to enhance dynamic compression techniques in conjunction with frontier methods for impulsive femtosecond heating and particle and photon probing. The LAPP Community seeks to combine three cutting-edge capabilities offered by NSF OPAL: dynamic compression, impulsive heating, and ultrafast probing. We present three stages of experiments leading to the flagship experiment: (1) create laser-produced relativistic pair plasmas in a new intensity regime; (2) perform dense plasma spectroscopy experiments to isochorically heat shock- and ramp-compressed targets to explore a wide range of temperatures and densities using high-resolution x-ray emission and absorption spectroscopy; (3) ramp-compress planetary materials (ex. SiO2, H2O, Fe) to conditions inside the cores of planets. This staged approach will lead to the flagship capability to shock and ramp-compress these planetary materials to terapascal pressures and use the femtosecond PW beams to create ultrafast probes for time-resolved x-ray and electron diffraction, radiography/phase contrast imaging, and x-ray emission and absorption spectroscopy to identify structural and electronic phase transitions and unravel their nonequilibrium dynamics.