Attaining a Pressure of More Than 1 Gbar in Targets of Solid-State Density during Deceleration of Laser-Accelerated Ions

The possibility of generating a substance with a high energy density during the deceleration of protons, which are accelerated by the laser-plasma method in a layer of a substance with a high charge, gold, is analyzed for the parameters of laser pulses that are planned to be obtained at the XCELS installation. It is shown that in this case, the formation of a substance is possible with record pressure values of more than 1 Gbar at a solid-state density, which corresponds to a specific energy release of tens of megajoules per gram. A specific feature of the deceleration process with such a high specific energy release is that the properties of the decelerating substance change during interaction. It is demonstrated that the ionization multiplicity of gold ions reaches 40–50, and the temperature of the resulting plasma is 1 keV. This leads to a decrease in the slowing-down power of the substance and to a modified curve of the specific energy release.