A study of timing jitter improvements on Z with a new laser triggering system

Abstract

A new, low jitter, laser trigger system (LTS) has been installed on the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories. The installation of the new tempest LTS has significantly reduced the jitter of the peak X-ray output. The most recent measurements of peak X-ray output show that the new LTS has reduced the jitter from 1/spl sigma/ = 2.5 ns to 1/spl sigma/ < 1 ns. In addition to having inherently less jitter than the old LTS, the independent precision triggering of the new LTS can compensate for timing errors due to drift and shot-to-shot correlations of other pulse power components further reducing the overall machine jitter. Specifically, the LTS compensates for trends in the gas switch runtime. By using a method based on linear prediction coefficients of previous shots, gas switch runtime noise can be further reduced by 1 ns.