About HELIX
There are many millions of possible materials, but modern civilization only uses a few thousand of them. The problem is that designing a new material takes a lot of time and a lot of money, and so we tend to reuse the materials we have rather than make new ones. The HELIX (High-throughput Extreme Laser Impact eXperiments) facility provides an extreme laser-based approach that allows us to rapidly and cheaply explore the properties of new materials. We can now perform thousands of tests of materials a day, compared to conventional approaches that allow only a few tests per day. This thousand-fold increase in throughput makes it possible to perform systematic discovery and design of materials.
HELIX uses multiple lasers brought together onto structured targets to develop high-throughput measurements of the dynamic mechanical properties of materials. Flyer plates are launched using an infrared drive laser with controllable output energy per pulse. The pulses are stretched temporally to 21 ns, and spatially homogenized into a top-hat profile using a diffractive optical element. The laser pulse is focused onto a flyer assembly, creating a high-pressure plasma, which then drives the (metal) flyer plate at velocities in the range of 600-1250 m/s depending on the laser energy and thickness of the flyer plate. During the experiment, the rear free surface velocity of the target is measured using photon Doppler velocimetry (PDV) through a measurement laser. All PDV signals are automatically captured, streamed, and analyzed to ensure high-throughput operation.