Intense heavy ion beams from the Gesellschaft für
Schwerionenforschung (GSI, Darmstadt, Germany) accelerator facilities,
together with two high energy laser systems: petawatt high energy laser
for ion experiments (PHELIX) and nanosecond high energy laser for ion
experiments (NHELIX) are a unique combination to facilitate pioneering
beam-plasma interaction experiments, to generate and probe
high-energy-density (HED) matter and to address basic physics issues
associated with heavy ion driven inertial confinement fusion. In one class
of experiments, the laser will be used to generate plasma and the ion beam
will be used to study the energy loss of energetic ions in ionized matter,
and to probe the physical state of the laser-generated plasma. In another
class of experiments, the intense heavy ion beam will be employed to
create a sample of HED matter and the laser beam, together with other
diagnostic tools, will be used to explore the properties of these exotic
states of matter. The existing heavy ion synchrotron facility, SIS18,
deliver an intense uranium beam that deposit about 1 kJ/g specific
energy in solid matter. Using this beam, experiments have recently been
performed where solid lead foils had been heated and a brightness
temperature on the order of 5000 K was measured, using a fast
multi-channel pyrometer that has been developed jointly by GSI and IPCP
Chernogolovka. It is expected that the future heavy ion facility, facility
for antiprotons and ion research (FAIR) will provide compressed beam
pulses with an intensity that exceeds the current beam intensities by
three orders of magnitude. This will open up the possibility to explore
the thermophysical and transport properties of HED matter in a regime that
is very difficult to access using the traditional methods of shock
compression. Beam plasma interaction experiments using dense plasmas with
a Γ-parameter between 0.5 and 1.5 have also been carried out. This
dense Ar-plasma was generated by explosively driven shockwaves and showed
enhanced energy loss for Xe and Ar ions in the energy range between 5.9 to
11.4 MeV.