A thin-film Hugoniot measurement using a laser-driven flyer plate

Abstract

A method is described where a tabletop laser-driven flyer plate apparatus using ∼8 ns launching pulses from a Nd:YAG laser is used to determine the Hugoniot of a thin layer of transparent materials impacted by 25 μm thick flyers moving up to 2 km/s, producing shocks that were fully supported for 8 ns. In this method, a high-speed 8 GHz fiberoptic displacement interferometer looks through the transparent sample, which has an ultrathin 50% reflecting mirror deposited on its surface, to simultaneously measure U s and U p on a single shot. The initial results obtained on a 31 μm thick film of PMMA were in excellent agreement with the Hugoniot literature. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.