Abstract

Free-electron laser facilities enable new applications in the field of high-pressure research including planetary materials. The European X-ray Free Electron Laser (European XFEL) in Hamburg, Germany will start user operation in 2017 and will provide photon energies of up to 25 keV. The high-energy density science instrument (HED) at the European XFEL is dedicated to the study of dense material at strong excitation in a temperature range from eV to keV and pressures > 100 GPa which is equivalent to an energy density > 100 J/mm$^{3}$. It will enable studying structural and electronic properties of excited states with hard X-rays at a repetition rate of up to 4.5 MHz. The instrument is currently in its technical design phase and first user experiments are foreseen for end of 2017. In this contribution, we present the X-ray instrumentation and the foreseen X-ray techniques at HED. In addition, we discuss prototype hard-condensed matter experiments in the field of planetary research as proposed during recent user consortium meetings for this instrument. These include optical laser induced quasiisentropic (ramped) compression and shock compression experiments and diamond anvil cell experiments.

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