Fig. 1. (a) Exploded view of the target layers. (b) Experimental schematic with drive parameters. Laser ablation drives a shock in the low-density foam. (c) When the shock passes the dust, small grains are accelerated to near the shock velocity and large grains to a fraction thereof, resulting in g–g collisions behind the shock.

Fig. 2. Summary of 1D HYADES results for a nominal case of small ( diameter) grains impacting large carbon grains of (a) and (b) diameter. The mass-averaged position (solid) and velocity (dashed) are shown as a function of time. The vertical dotted line indicates the time (5 ns) at which the small grains reach the large grains. The relative velocity between the grains in both cases is . These simulations used a 25 mg/cc foam.

Fig. 3. Top and axial views of the experimental geometry illustrating the targets and primary diagnostics.

Fig. 4. (a) Imaging geometry for the PCI diagnostic on MEC with an initial beam diameter . A 500  square area in the detector plane of a simulated 8.2 keV phase-contrast image. The simulation implemented randomly distributed C grains, a finite source size (100 nm) and instrumental broadening. (b) Simulated diffraction patterns in X-ray intensity from carbon grains for this PCI setup normalized to the background X-ray intensity. (c) The value is the measured peak-to-valley intensity relative to the background intensity and is shown for the different carbon grain sizes in (b). Abbreviation: , signal to background.

Fig. 5. (a) Simulated Thomson spectra for the proposed geometry using an 8.2 keV beam with an FWHM of 20 eV and the plasma parameters indicated. (b) Photonics calculations, where , for the diffraction orders , 4 and 6 using the HAPG crystal with an initial photon count of and 10 eV energy bins at the detector. Abbreviation: HAPG, highly annealed pyrolytic graphite.