A new approach to the study of material strength of metals at extreme pressures has been developed on the Omega laser, using a ramped plasma piston drive. The laser drives a shock through a solid plastic reservoir that unloads at the rear free surface, expands across a vacuum gap, and stagnates on the metal sample under study. This produces a gently increasing ram pressure, compressing the sample nearly isentropically. The peak pressure on the sample, inferred from VISAR measurements of velocity, can be varied by adjusting the laser energy and pulse length, gap size, and reservoir density, and obeys a simple scaling relation. In an important application, using in-flight x-ray radiography, the material strength of solid-state samples at high pressure can be inferred by measuring the reductions in the growth rates (stabilization) of Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) unstable interfaces. This paper reports the first attempt to use this new laser-driven, quasi-isentropic technique for determining material strength in high-pressure solids. Modulated foils of Al-6061-T6 were accelerated and compressed to peak pressures of 200 kbar. Modulation growth was recorded at a series of times after peak acceleration and well into the release phase. Fits to the growth data, using a Steinberg-Guinan (SG) constitutive strength model, give yield strengths 30% greater than those given by the nominal parameters for Al-6061-T6. Calculations indicate that the dynamic enhancement to the yield strength at 200 kbar is a factor of (approx)2.5x over the ambient yield strength of 2.9 kbar. Experimental designs based on this drive developed for the NIF laser, predict that solid-state samples can be quasi-isentropically driven to pressures an order of magnitude higher than on Omega--accessing new regimes of dense, high-pressure matter.
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