stretched until sufficient tension is reached to cause rupture through the formation and growth of bubbles. The reflection of a pressure pulse from a free surface has been used extensively to study the behavior of liquids in tension [@Bull1956; @Erlich1971; @Carlson1975; @Trevena1987; @Utkin2010], and plays an important role in a number of physical processes, including underwater explosions [@Kolsky1949; @Cole1948; @Kedrinskii2005], the fracture of kidney stones using shock wave lithotripsy [@Zhu2002], and the formation of jet-like instabilities during the explosively driven dispersal of liquids. [@Milne2017] Shock-wave-induced cavitation is also of interest for a recently proposed Magnetized Target Fusion concept in which a spherically imploding shock wave is used to collapse a liquid metal cavity onto a plasma target in order to reach fusion conditions. [@Laberge2008; @Laberge2009; @Suponitsky2014; @Suponitsky2017]

Bull [@Bull1956] was the first to develop an experimental apparatus that used pressure wave reflection from a free surface to measure the maximum tension in the liquid prior to cavitation. In these *bullet-piston* experiments, an impact-driven pressure pulse is fed into a long vertical column of liquid with a free surface in contact with a gas atmosphere near the top. [@Bull1956] The incident pressure pulse reflects from the free surface as an expansion 