Computation of Impurity Effects on Argon Pinch Soft X-Ray Emission Using the Nonrelativistic 4-D Vlasov–Maxwell Approach

Abstract

In this article, the Vlasov–Maxwell equations have been integrated by the forward semi-Lagrangian method to compute the soft X-ray (SXR) emission from a dense plasma focus device filled with pure and impure argon. The impurity has been assumed as copper of which the electrodes were made. The results have shown that, in the case of pure argon, the emission power reached up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.5 \times 10^{9}{\mathrm {W}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . However, for the impurity with a 10% volumetric fraction and with the effective charge number of 10, the emission power reduced to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4\times 10^{5}{\mathrm {W}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . With the further increase in the impurity amount, the emission power reduced again. However, if the impurity charge number is close to the pure gas charge number, the attenuation of the SXR emission decreases.