The sun in the laboratory
An international research team has succeeded in creating conditions in the laboratory as extreme as those that prevail inside stars. The
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An international research team has succeeded in creating conditions in the laboratory as extreme as those that prevail inside stars. The
Warm dense matter (WDM) measures thousands of degrees in temperature and is under the pressure of thousands of Earth's atmospheres. Found in many places throughout the universe, it is expected to ...
Recent research at the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) facility has shown that it is possible to achieve conditions in an experiment similar to those at the center of planets.1 The European XFEL project is a unique facility capable of producing incredibly intense pulses of high-energy X-ray radiation.
At the heart of planets, extreme states are to be found: temperatures of thousands of degrees, pressures a million times greater than atmospheric
Credit: Attila Cangi The study of warm dense matter helps us understand what is going on inside giant planets, brown dwarfs, and neutron stars. However, this state of matter, which exhibits properties of both solids and plasmas, does not occur naturally on Earth. It can be produced artificially in the lab using large X-ray experiments, albeit only at a small scale and for short periods of time. Theoretical and numerical models are essential to evaluate these experiments, which are impossible to interpret without formulas, algorithms, and simulations. Scientists at the Center for Advanced Syst...