Aluminum (Al) particles are good fuel additives to improve the energy output performances of explo-sives. Under detonation environment, reaction delay of Al particles plays a key role in the energy release efficiency. Up to date, reaction delay of Al particles is still limited by the efficiency of mass and heat transfer from oxidizers to Al particles. To address this issue, a homogeneous fuel-oxidizer assembly has recently become a promising strategy. In this work, oxidizer-activated Al fuel particles (ALG) were prepared with glycidyl azide polymer (GAP) as the oxidizer. The ALG was in uniform spherical shape and core-shell structure with shell layer of around 5 nm which was observed by scanning electron micro-scope and transmission electron microscope. The localized nanoscale mid-IR measurement detected the uniform distribution of characteristic absorption bond of GAP in the shell layer which confirmed the homogenous fuel-oxidizer structure of ALG. A thermal gravimetric analysis of ALG at ultrafast heating rate of 1000 degrees C/min under argon atmosphere was conducted. The decomposition of GAP finished much earlier than that of GAP at heating rate of 10 degrees C/min. Under ultrafast high laser fluence, the reaction response of ALG was characterized and compared with that of micro-sized Al (mu Al). With the increase of laser energy, the propagation distance of the shock wave increased. However, the velocity histories were nearly the same when energies were lower than 299 mJ or higher than 706 mJ. The propagation distance of the shock wave for ALG was 0.5 mm larger than that for mu Al at 2.1 mu s. The underwater explosion showed the peak pressure and the shock wave energy of the ALG-based explosive were both higher than those of the mu Al-based explosive at 2.5 m. This study shows the feasibility to improve the energy release of Al-based explosives via using the oxidizer-activated Al fuel particles with energetic polymer as the oxidizer.(c) 2022 China Ordnance Society. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).