ISSN:
1089-7674
Source:
AIP Digital Archive
Topics:
Physics
Notes:
The Z pinch is enjoying a renaissance as the world's most powerful yet efficient soft x-ray source which can energize large volume hohlraums for indirectly driven inertial confinement fusion. It has the advantages of being efficient and having high energy and power density. Its early history will be traced from the 18th century to the present day. The most notable feature of the Z pinch is its instability. The various regimes of stability analysis will be reviewed, including resistive and finite ion Larmor radius effects. Work in the last 10 years on single fibres, especially of cryogenic deuterium, gave neutrons that were of the same origin, namely, beam–plasma interactions, as reported by Kurchatov. The renaissance has come about through the implosion of arrays of fine wires. Research at Sandia National Laboratory has shown that by using more and finer wires, the x-ray radiation emitted at stagnation increased in power and decreased in pulse width. The understanding of these results has been advanced considerably by theory, simulation and smaller-scale, well diagnosed experiments showing the early uncorrelated m=0 instabilities on each wire, the inward jetting of plasma to the axis, the global Rayleigh–Taylor instability and the mitigating effect of nested arrays. © 2000 American Institute of Physics.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.874047
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