Issue 18, 2022

Laser pulses into bullets: tabletop shock experiments

Abstract

This article discusses tabletop high-throughput laser experiments on shock waves in solids and liquids, where the more usual laser pump pulse is replaced by a 0.5 mm diameter laser-launched bullet, a thin metal disk called a flyer plate. The hypervelocity flyer (up to 6 km s−1 or Mach 18) can have kinetic energy (∼1 J) to briefly produce extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, thousands of K and tens of GPa (1 GPa = 10 000 bar) in a small volume with a rise time <2 ns. The experiments are performed using a “shock compression microscope”, a microscope fitted with the laser flyer launcher plus an optical velocimeter, a high-speed laser interferometer that measures the motion of the flyer plate or the sample material after impact. This makes it possible to generate extreme conditions at the push of a button in an intrinsically safe environment, and probe with any of the diagnostics used in microscope experiments, such as high-speed video, optical emission, nonlinear coherent spectroscopies and so on. The barrier to entering this field is relatively low since many laser laboratories already possess much of the needed instrumentation. A brief introduction to shock waves and instrumentation is presented. Then several examples of recent applications are described, including shocked water, the photophysics of fluorescent molecules under extreme conditions, shocked protein solutions, shocked metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), shocked explosives, chemical catalysis in a shocked liquid, and molecules at shocked interfaces. Since one can shoot a bullet at practically anything, there are many emerging opportunities in chemistry, biophysics, materials science, physics and hypervelocity aerodynamics.

Graphical abstract: Laser pulses into bullets: tabletop shock experiments

Article information

Article type
Perspective
Submitted
25 Jän 2022
Accepted
14 Apr 2022
First published
26 Apr 2022

Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2022,24, 10653-10666

Author version available

Laser pulses into bullets: tabletop shock experiments

D. D. Dlott, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2022, 24, 10653 DOI: 10.1039/D2CP00418F

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements