Investigating radiatively driven, magnetised plasmas with a university scale pulsed-power generator
Abstract
We present first results from a novel experimental platform which is able to access physics relevant to topics including indirect-drive magnetised ICF; laser energy deposition; various topics in atomic physics; and laboratory astrophysics (for example the penetration of B-fields into HED plasmas). This platform uses the X-Rays from a wire array Z-Pinch to irradiate a silicon target, producing an outflow of ablated plasma. The ablated plasma expands into ambient, dynamically significant B-fields (~5 T) which are supported by the current flowing through the Z-Pinch. The outflows have a well-defined (quasi-1D) morphology, enabling the study of fundamental processes typically only available in more complex, integrated schemes. Experiments were fielded on the MAGPIE pulsed-power generator (1.4 MA, 240 ns rise time). On this machine a wire array Z-Pinch produces an X-Ray pulse carrying a total energy of ~15 kJ over ~30 ns. This equates to an average brightness temperature of around 10 eV on-target.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2203.11881,
title = {Investigating radiatively driven, magnetised plasmas with a university scale pulsed-power generator},
author = {Jack W. D. Halliday and Aidan Crilly and Jeremy Chittenden and Roberto C. Mancini and Stefano Merlini and Steven Rose and Danny R. Russell and Lee G. Suttle and Vicente Valenzuela-Villaseca and Simon N. Bland and Sergey V. Lebedev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.11881},
year = {2024}
}