A new research capability funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is being dedicated this week by the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Washington State University, NNSA announced Thursday.
This new Dynamic Compression Sector (DCS) is intended to support NNSA’s stockpile stewardship mission in addition to the Department of Defense’s national security research. Researchers will film “the behavior of materials subjected to extreme conditions through tunable, high-energy X-ray pulses for viewing condensed matter changes at the microscopic level during a shock compression event,” which will inform them of material behavior under extreme conditions and in short time scales, NNSA said.
NNSA spokeswoman Francie Israeli noted by email, “Unlike other capabilities within the NNSA complex, scientists using the DCS can capture multiple images of the change in a material’s crystal structure and microstructure within a single experiment under impact from a laser drive or a gas gun.”
The NNSA-funded DCS is located at the Argonne lab’s Advanced Photon Source facility near Chicago, Ill., a large X-ray microscope with high-energy X-ray beams that allows researchers to see processes occurring at an atomic level.
Washington State University has received $21.9 million from 2011 to 2016 in support of DCS through two cooperative agreements, Israeli said, adding that of this, $3 million was a contribution from the U.S. Army in 2014. The project is managed as a partnership between the university and the Advanced Photon Source.
