Studying planetary matter using intense x-ray pulses

Free-electron laser facilities enable new applications in the field of high-pressure research including planetary materials. The European x-ray Free Electron Laser (European XFEL) in Hamburg, Germany will start user operation in 2017 and will provide photon energies of up to 25 keV. The high-energy density science instrument (HED) is one of the six baseline instruments at the European XFEL. It is dedicated to the study of dense material at strong excitation in a temperature range from eV to keV and pressures > 100 GPa which is equivalent to an energy density > 100 J mm(-3). It will enable studying structural and electronic properties of excited states with hard x-rays. The instrument is currently in its technical design phase and first user experiments are foreseen for summer 2017. In this contribution, we present the x-ray instrumentation and foreseen x-ray techniques at HED and concentrate on prototype hard-condensed matter experiments in the field of planetary research as proposed during recent user consortium meetings for this instrument. These include quasi-isentropic (ramped) compression and shock compression experiments.