High Energy Densities in Laboratories

The ultimate objective of experiments in high-energy-density physics consists in the generation of extreme material parameters, whose values are at the boundaries of modern experimental capabilities (Table 3.1). Already, plasma states with peak pressures of hundreds or thousands of megabars, temperatures up to 10 billion degrees, and energy densities of 109 J/cm3, which is comparable to the energy density of nuclear matter, have become the subject of laboratory investigations [29, 38, 31, 10, 99, 9].