X-ray absorption radiography for high pressure shock wave studies
The study of laser compressed matter, both warm dense matter (WDM) and hot dense matter
(HDM), is relevant to several research areas, including materials science, astrophysics, inertial
confinement fusion. X-ray absorption radiography is a unique tool to diagnose compressed WDM
and HDM. The application of radiography to shock-wave studies is presented and discussed. In
addition to the standard Abel inversion to recover a density map from a transmission map, a
procedure has been developed to generate synthetic radiographs using density maps produced by
the hydrodynamics code DUED. This procedure takes into account both source-target geometry
and source size (which plays a non negligible role in the interpretation of the data), and allows to
reproduce transmission data with a good degree of accuracy.