High-energy density experiments for Atlas

Summary form only given, as follows. Atlas is a high-energy pulsed-power facility under development at Los Alamos National Laboratory to drive high-energy density experiments. It is optimized for materials properties and hydrodynamics experiments under extreme conditions. The system is designed to implode heavy liner loads with a peak current of 30-40 MA delivered in /spl sim/4 /spl mu/s. Atlas will be operational in near the end of 2000 and is designed to provide 100 shots per year. The Atlas capacitor bank consists of an array 240-kV Marx modules storing a total of 24-MJ. For many applications the Atlas liner will be a nominal 50-gram-aluminum cylinder with /spl sim/5-cm radius and 4-cm length. Implosion velocities up to 20 km/s are predicted. Using composite inner layers and a variety of interior target designs, a wide variety of experiments in /spl sim/cm/sup 3/ volumes may be performed. These include shock compression experiments up to /spl sim/2 TPa (20 Mbar), quasi-adiabatic compressions up to 6-fold compression and pressures above 10 TPa, hydrodynamic instability studies in nonlinear and turbulent regimes over multi-cm propagation lengths, experiments with dense, strongly-coupled plasmas, studies of materials response at very high strains and strain rates, and materials studies in ultrahigh magnetic fields (above 10/sup 3/ T). Experimental configurations, associated physics issues, and diagnostic strategies will be discussed. Near-term proof-of-principle experiments on the smaller Pegasus II capacitor bank will be identified.