A review of recent z-pinch research at Maxwell Physics International

Abstract

During the last few years, we have concentrated on developing plasma radiation sources (PRS) for the longer current rise time (up to 300 ns) of the direct-drive Decade Quad (DQ; Price et al., 1999). In particular, we have developed an argon gas-puff PRS that produces a high quality pinch with an ∼200-ns implosion time, twice the implosion time of typical z pinches. We have shown that large-diameter, solid-fill (i.e., the gas density is a smooth function of the radial distance rather than a discrete shell) gas puffs can achieve adequate heating and stability for long-implosion z pinches with good K-shell yield.