X-ray absorption spectroscopy for wire-array Z-pinches at the non-radiative stage

• Published in: High energy density physics Vol. 7; no. 4; pp. 383 - 390
• Main Authors: Ivanov, V.V., Hakel, P., Mancini, R.C., Chittenden, J.P., Anderson, A., Shevelko, A.P., Wiewior, P., Durmaz, T., Altemara, S.D., Papp, D., Astanovitskiy, A.L., Nalajala, V., Chalyy, O., Dmitriev, O.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01-12-2011
• Subjects: Absorption spectroscopy; X-ray backlighting; Z-pinch; Absorption spectroscopy; Z-pinch; X-ray backlighting
• ISSN: 1574-1818; 1878-0563
• DOI: 10.1016/j.hedp.2011.08.002

Absorption spectroscopy was applied to wire-array Z-pinches on the 1 MA pulsed-power Zebra generator at the Nevada Terawatt Facility (NTF). The 50 TW Leopard laser was coupled with the Zebra generator for X-ray backlighting of wire arrays at the ablation stage. Broadband X-ray emission from a laser-produced Sm plasma was used to backlight Al star wire arrays in the range of 7–9 Å. Two time-integrated X-ray conical spectrometers recorded reference and absorption spectra. The spectrometers were shielded from the bright Z-pinch X-ray burst by collimators. The comparison of plasma-transmitted spectra with reference spectra indicates absorption lines in the range of 8.1–8.4 Å. Analysis of Al K-shell absorption spectra with detailed atomic kinetics models shows a distribution of electron temperature in the range of 10–30 eV that was fitted with an effective two-temperature model. Temperature and density distributions in wire-array plasma were simulated with a three-dimension magneto-hydrodynamic code. Post-processing of this code’s output yields synthetic transmission spectrum which is in general agreement with the data.