Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2011
Because of its importance in designing safer, more reliable explosives the shock to detonation transition in condensed phase energetic materials has long been a subject of experimental and theoretical study. This transition is thought to involve local hot-spots which represent regions in the material which couple efficiently to the shock wave leading to a locally higher temperature and ultimately initiation. However, how at the atomic scale energy is transferred from the shock front into these local “hot spots” remains a key question to be answered in studies of the predetonation process. In this paper we report results of molecular dynamics simulations that suggest that even nanometer scale defects can play an important role in the shock to detonation transition.