Quantifying the partial ionization effect of gold in the transition region between condensed matter and warm dense matter

It is now well known that solids under ultra-high-pressure shock compression will enter the warm dense matter (WDM) regime which connects condensed matter and hot plasma. How condensed matter turns into the WDM, however, remains largely unexplored due to the lack of data in the transition pressure range. In this letter, by employing the unique high-Z three-stage gas gun launcher technique developed recently, we compress gold into TPa shock pressure to fill the gap inaccessible by the two-stage gas gun and laser shock experiments. With the aid of high-precision Hugoniot data obtained experimentally, we observe a clear softening behavior beyond -560 GPa. The state-of-the-art ab-initio molecular dynamics calculations reveal that the softening is caused by the ionization of 5d electrons in gold. This work quantifies the partial ionization effect of electrons under extreme conditions, which is critical to model the transition between condensed matter and WDM.