Theory and simulation of warm dense matter targets

We present simulations and analysis of the heating of warm dense matter foils by ion beams with ion energy less than one MeV per nucleon to target temperatures of order one eV. Simulations were carried out using the multi-physics radiation hydrodynamics code HYDRA and comparisons are made with analysis and the code DPC. We simulate possible targets for a proposed experiment at LBNL (the so-called Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment, NDCXII) for studies of warm dense matter. We compare the dynamics of ideally heated targets, under several assumed equation of states, exploring dynamics in the two-phase (fluid-vapor) regime.