Inelastic Deformations in Shock Compressed Diamond

Understanding diamond response to shock compression at megabar pressures is of critical importance for design of instability-free inertial confinement fusion implosions of diamond ablation capsules. Recent shock experiments using single crystal diamond have uncovered strong orientational dependent response in split elastic-inelastic shock wave regime. However, underlying mechanisms of crystalline anisotropy of shock response are currently unknown. In this work, large-scale molecular dynamic simulations of shock compression on diamond are performed using quantum accurate SNAP machine learning potential for carbon to provide atomic scale insights into the mechanisms of inelastic deformations in shocked diamond. The MD simulations of shock propagation along three crystallographic directions and a wide range of shock intensities uncover unusual persistence of anisotropic effects at very high pressures up to complete melting along diamond shock Hugoniot.