The High Energy Density science instrument at the European XFEL, Hamburg, Germany: a new platform for shock compression research

Free-electron laser facilities enable new applications in the field of high-pressure research including geo- and planetary sciences. At the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) in Hamburg, one of the six baseline instruments is dedicated to High Energy Density Science (HED). A 100 J optical laser with nanosecond pulse duration, high repetition rate and pulse shaping option will be integrated at this instrument, which will allow to shock compressing matter to very high internal pressures of up to 1 TPa and to off-Hugoniot states at lower pressures with ramped compression. This will enable to mimic conditions similar to the interior of Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Earth and Venus. The extreme states of matter can then be probed with the FEL X-ray source. At European XFEL hard X-rays with photon energies of up to 25 keV will be available. At the HED instrument, several X-ray techniques will be realized to probe the samples such as X-ray diffraction, X-ray imaging and spectroscopy including XANES. The high intensity and time structure of the FEL beam will enable time-resolved pump-probe studies of the samples generated during dynamic compression. The envisaged instrument time resolution is in the range of a few 10s fs which is well below the time scales of phase transitions. In addition, the high brilliance and coherence of the FEL radiation will allow spatially resolved studies. The HED instrument is currently in its detailed design phase and first user operation is foreseen for late 2017. In this contribution, we will present the capabilities of the HED instrument with respect to geo- and planetary sciences, compare this to state-of-the-art in-situ techniques and will show planned first experiments of this instrument.