Establishing gold and platinum standards to 1 terapascal using shockless compression

New techniques are advancing the frontier of high-pressure physics beyond 1 terapascal, leading to new discoveries and offering stringent tests for condensed-matter theory and advanced numerical methods. However, the ability to absolutely determine the pressure state remains challenging, and well-calibrated pressure-density reference materials are required. We conducted shockless dynamic compression experiments at the National Ignition Facility and the Z machine to obtain quasi-absolute, high-precision, pressure-density equation-of-state data for gold and platinum. We derived two experimentally constrained pressure standards to terapascal conditions. Establishing accurate experimental determinations of extreme pressure will facilitate better connections between experiments and theory, paving the way toward improving our understanding of material response to these extreme conditions.

Heavy-Ion Collisions at FAIR-NICA Energies

The “Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research” (FAIR) in Darmstadt, Germany, and the “Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility” (NICA) in Dubna, Russia, are two accelerator centers under construction. FAIR will provide beams and experimental setups to perform forefront research in hadron, nuclear, atomic, and plasma physics, as well as in radiation biology and material science. At NICA, a unique research program on nuclear matter and spin physics will be conducted. Both facilities will execute experiments to explore the properties of QCD matter at neutron star core densities, in order to study the high-density equation of state, and to shed light on the quark degrees-of-freedom emerging in QCD matter at high densities. The research programs will be performed at FAIR with the CBM experiment, and at NICA with the MPD setup at the collider, and with the BM@N experiment at the Nuclotron. These three experiments are complementary, with respect to the beam energy. The physics programs and the relevant experimental observables will be discussed.

Probing Dense QCD Matter: Muon Measurements with the CBM Experiment at FAIR

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt is designed to investigate the properties of high-density QCD matter with multi-differential measurements of hadrons and leptons, including rare probes such as multi-strange anti-hyperons and charmed particles. The research program covers the study of the high-density equation-of-state of nuclear matter and the exploration of the QCD phase diagram at large baryon chemical potentials, including the search for quark matter and the critical endpoint of a hypothetical 1st order phase transition. The CBM setup comprises detector systems for the identification of charged hadrons, electrons, and muons; for the determination of collision centrality and the orientation of the reaction plane; and a free-streaming data read-out and acquisition system, which allows online reconstruction and selection of events up to reaction rates of 10 MHz. In this article, emphasis is placed on the measurement of muon pairs in Au-Au collisions at FAIR beam energies, which are unique probes used to determine the temperature of the fireball, and hence to search for a caloric curve of QCD matter. Simultaneously, the subthreshold production of charmonium can be studied via its dimuon decay in order to shed light on the microscopic structure of QCD matter at high baryon densities. The CBM setup with focus on dimuon measurements and the results of the corresponding physics performance studies will be presented.

Weyssenhoff Fluid Sphere Models in Einstein-Cartan Theory

We obtain three models for Geodesic flows and three models for Non-Geodesic flows of Weyssenhoff fluid considering it as the source of gravitation and spin in the Einstein-Cartan field equations. Influence of spin on the pressure, density, equation of state and the kinematical parameters is observed in both geodesic and non-geodesic models.

Effect of different vacuum on field emission of carbon nanotube arrays

In this paper, the electron-molecule collision ionization is added to field emission under non-vacuum conditions, and the change of emission current caused by vacuum adjustment in field emission of carbon nanotubes is explained. The field emission current density equation under non-vacuum conditions is established. Through the theoretical analysis and the processing of experimental data, it can be concluded that when other variables are controlled unchanged, the change of pressure will affect the concentration of gas molecules in the air and the collision probability with electrons, then the density of emission current is changed. The study has a certain reference value for the application of field emission in low vacuum and atmospheric pressure.