Understanding Matter at Superdense and Warm Conditions*

Warm and extremely-dense matter, having mass densities ranging from tens to millions of gram per cubic centimeter and temperatures of 10,000 to 1,000,000 K, widely exist in the universe such as giant planet cores and brown/white dwarfs. Thanks to advances in technology, such extreme conditions can now be created in laboratories by powerful lasers or pulsed-power machines. The experimental advances have certainly helped us to unravel how matter behaves under warm and superdense conditions. On the theory and computation side, first-principles tools such as thermal density-functional theory (DFT) are often used to reveal novel properties of warm and extremely-dense matter. Many new phenomena, for example, unusual K-edge shifting,[1] interspecies radiative transition,[2] and dynamical K_α/β–emission/absorption line movements,[3] have recently been predicted by ab initio DFT calculations. Some of them are recently confirmed by experimental measurements. In this talk, we will cover the recent progress in understanding the physics of matter in such extreme environments through both computational and experimental studies.


[1] S. X. Hu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 065001 (2017).

[2] S. X. Hu et al., Nat. Commun. 11, 1989 (2020).

[3] S. X. Hu et al., “Extreme Atomic Physics at Peta-Pascals Probed by Time-Resolved Spectroscopy,” to be submitted to Nature Physics.

*In collaboration with P. M. Nilson, V. V. Karasiev, V. Recoules, I. E. Golovkin, T. Walton