The spherical pinch experiment: generation of laser driven converging blast wave

Summary form only given. In a laser facility with an energy up to 20 Joules (7 ns FWHM) at 1.06 /spl mu/m in each of the two beams, experiments are being performed on the converging motion of a shock wave glass cell. These laser beams from axially opposite directions irradiate a glass cell over a wide solid angle in such a way that a quasi-spherically symmetric convergent shock wave is generated from the evaporation of an aluminum layer coated over the internal surface of the glass cell. The temporal evolution the of inwardly converging shock wave has been consistently followed by a frame camera and an interference holographic technique.