Theory and simulation of warm dense matter targets

We present simulations and analysis of the heating of warm dense matter (WDM) foils by ion beams with energy less than 1 MeV per nucleon to target temperatures of order 1 eV. Simulations were carried out using the multi-physics radiation hydrodynamics code HYDRA and comparisons are made to an analytical model and the code DPC. We simulate possible targets to be used in a proposed experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (the so-called Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment, NDCX II) for studies of WDM. We compare the dynamics of ideally heated targets under several assumed equations of state and explore target dynamics in the two-phase (fluid–vapor) regime.