Principal component analysis of electron beams generated in K-shell aluminum X-pinch plasma produced by a compact LC-generator

Abstract

Principal component analysis (PCA) method is applied and compared with the line ratios of H-like and He-like transitions, in order to investigate the effects of electron beam on the K-shell Aluminum synthetic spectra. It is also used as a diagnostics to estimate the plasma parameters of K-shell Al X-pinch plasma spectrum. This spectrum is produced by the explosion of two 25-μm Al wires on a compact LC (40 kV, 200 kA) generator. The database for the principal component extraction is created over a previously developed, non-LTE, collisional radiative K-shell Aluminum model. As a result, PCA shows an agreement with the line ratios which are sensitive to plasma electron temperatures, densities and beam fractions. Principal component analysis also illustrates that the addition to the non-LTE model of a fraction f of electrons in an energetic beam, generates the clusters in a three dimensional vector space which are translations of each other and follows reverse v-shaped cascade trajectories, except for the f = 0.0 case. Modeling of a typical shot by PCA gives the plasma electron temperature of Te = 100 eV, density of Ne = 1 × 1020 cm−3 and hot electron fraction of f = 0.2 (with a beam energy centered at 10 keV).