Towards higher densities of matter: ultra-high pre-compression in shock dynamic experiments

We introduce a new design of a shock diamond anvil cell (SDAC) for combining high static pre-compression and sub-kJ laser-driven dynamic shock compression experiments at X-ray sources. We designed a system of two thin diamond anvils, one of which is perforated with a thin diamond window (30-70 μm) on top of the culet. The perforation is envisioned to allow shock waves created by low/moderate energy lasers to propagate through the sample. Being developed to be usable by any user community at the High Energy Density (HED) instrument at European-XFEL, or other large-scale facilities around the world, the unique design of the SDAC will allow to reach higher density states of matter in dynamic compression experiments and probe previously unexplored regions of the pressure-temperature-density phase diagram, combined with the diagnostics capability of the XFEL. We will present our most recent technical developments and results of the pre-compression pressures achieved using SDAC along with hydrodynamic simulation results of dense Krypton, among other samples, laser-shocked at different initial densities.