Development of a real-time transmittance monitoring system for a transparent sample in a shock compression experiment

Optical transmittance measurement plays an important role in studying the phase transition mechanism of transparent liquids. A new real-time transmittance monitoring system was constructed to investigate the phase transition in transparent liquids under dynamic compression. The results show that for water, there are a transition occurring on sub-μs time scales during the second shock compress, which presents good agreement with Dolan's result. This finding demonstrates that the water response is indeed strongly time-dependent. A similar experiment has also been done for the shocked benzene, but no obviously phase transition information has been obtained.