Z-pinch radial behavior using 1D visible and X-ray streak measurements on the Z-accelerator

Summary form only given, as follows. At Sandia National Laboratories we are using the Z-accelerator, which provides nominally a 20-MA peak current with a 100-ns risetime, to study fast Z-pinch physics. On the Z accelerator we use wire arrays in a cylindrical geometry as the initial pinch configuration. Typical arrays are 1-2 cm tall with radii of 1-2 cm. The array implosions are modeled with 0-D circuit codes and 1 or 2-D radiative-magneto-hydrodynamic simulations which assume a shell-like behavior for the imploding array. The actual 3D nature of the implosion may be much more complicated. Work at Imperial College, on a much smaller driver, has shown that there can be significant plasma pre-fill due to coronal discharge from individual wires resulting in array radius vs time behavior which is very different from a simple thin imploding shell. Motivated by this work we have used a fiber array coupled to an optical streak camera viewing visible and (by utilizing a scintillator) X-ray emission from the array as a function of radius. We present the diagnostic setup and results from a number of wire array configurations showing the radius of the emissions compared with calculations.