Radiation experiments on the Z-machine

High temperatures generated from imploding wires arrays on the Sandia National Laboratories Z-machine produce a radiation source with a bolometric temperature of several hundred eV. By surrounding the Z-pinch implosion with a hohlraum a nearly Planckian source of about 140 eV peak temperature and 10 ns width is created. However the high temperature peak is preceded by a lower temperature foot of about 30 eV temperature lasting almost 100 ns. To prevent experiments from being destroyed by the pre-pulse a thin plastic burn-through foil is placed between the hohlraum and the experiment. The foil thickness and composition are chosen to ionize and become transparent at the time the high temperature pulse occurs. Also at these temperatures diagnostic holes in the hohlraum wall vaporize and material jets into the hole reducing the effective hole size. We present a series of Z-machine experiments which characterized and modified the raw radiation source into a suitable driver for radiation flow experiments.