Comparative analysis of X-ray emission and dynamics of Cu foil and wire X-pinches

Abstract

Here we present data from copper foil X-pinch experiments conducted on the 250kA, 150ns rise-time GenASIS driver at UCSD. Previous laser-cut foil experiments on this driver showed that foil X-pinches produced micron-order spot sizes and nanosecond-order single emission pulses1. For the current experiments, three different designs of foils were cut using two different laser-cutting platforms at the General Atomics Laser Micro-Machining (LMM) Center. From these targets we present a dataset including absolutely calibrated flux and both L-shell and K-shell spectroscopy comparing the parameters of foils of different designs to one another and to Cu wire X-pinches of comparable cross-point mass. The foil X-pinches show improved reliability over the wire X-pinches in emission timing, pulse width, source location, single-source production.