The Fuego Nuevo II dense plasma focus

Summary form only given, as follows. A new dense plasma focus device, named Fuego Nuevo II, has been built at the ICN-UNAM, its goal is to help to understand the physics of accelerated ion beams, X-rays, and their role in neutron pulse generation. The purpose of this report is to show the initial results, obtained at early operation. This is a small device with brass electrodes; the inner electrode is 40 mm in diameter, and 53 mm long, while the outer electrode is of squirrel cage configuration, with twelve bars. 45 mm long, arranged on a 100 mm diameter circle, each bar 8 mm in diameter. The insulator is a Pyrex glass tube, 30 mm long and 50 mm wide. The focus is driven by four 1.87 /spl mu/F capacitors with 24 nH inductance, operated at around 30 kV. The transmission line is made of paralleled cooper sheets insulated by Mylar, with an estimated inductance of 50 nH. Soft X-rays emitted from a 13 kJ DPF are detected. Hydrogen or a mixture of hydrogen and argon are used as filling gas. The image of the emitting area (time integrated) is taken with a five hole X-rays pin hole camera. The visible light is filtered using Al foils of different thickness in each of the five holes. The image is a fine line (2 mm long) of the PF axis, into which several bright points can be observed. An estimation of the emitting zone temperature is performed through measurements of transmittance for each hole image using radiographic plate densitometry. The background plasma emission corresponds to a temperature between 1 and 2 keV.