A Statistical Method of Nanosecond, Low-Temperature Optical Pyrometry for Dynamic Compression Experiments

Dynamic compression experiments use streaked optical pyrometry to measure the temperature of heated materials due to compression, assuming they behave like black (or grey) bodies. For very low temperature targets (<5000 K), few photons are captured by a streak camera with a typical sweep time window (27 to 50 ns). The histogram of the resulting image resembles a slightly distorted Gaussian, very close to the Gaussian histogram of the background signal. A statistical method is developed to extract temperature information from such histograms and is applied to silicon ramp-compression experiments. This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration under Award Number DE-NA0003856.