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 on single crystal diamond uncovered strong orientational dependent inelastic response in split elastic-inelastic shock wave regime. However, underlying mechanisms of crystalline anisotropy and atomic-scale mechanisms of inelastic deformations are currently unknown. In this work, large-scale molecular dynamic simulations of diamond shock compression are performed using quantum accurate SNAP machine learning potential for carbon to investigate shock response along three <100>, <110> and <111 crystallographic directions in a wide range of shock intensities.  Unusual persistence of anisotropic effects is observed at very high pressures up to complete melting  along diamond shock Hugoniot.