Studies of High Energy Density Matter Including Strongly Coupled Plasmas Using Intense Heavy Ion Beams at the GSI Darmstadt and Future FAIR Accelerator Facilities

Detailed numerical simulations and analytic work have shown that an intense heavy ion beam that will be generated at the future FAIR facility at Darmstadt, that will have an intensity of 2$\;\times\;$10$^{12}$ uranium ions per bunch with a bunch length of 50 ns and a particle energy of 0.4~-~2.7~GeV/u, will be a very efficient tool to create high-energy-density (HED) states in matter including strongly coupled plasmas. These theoretical studies have shown that using this ion beam one will be able to study those regions of the phase diagram that are either very difficult to access or are even unaccessible using the traditional methods of shock compression.