Temperature spatial distribution and thermal heat flow in laser heated plasma experiments relevant to MagLIF

A series of laser heated plasma experiments relevant to Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion have been performed at Z. The deuterium gas fill was doped with a trace amount of argon for spectroscopy diagnosis. Time-integrated spectra with spatial resolution along the axis of the liner and time-integrated x-ray narrowband images were produced. In the spectra, Argon K-shell line emission from the He-α resonance and intercombination lines and their associated Li-like satellites were observed. A multi-objective analysis based on forward reconstruction and a Pareto genetic algorithm driven search in parameter space has been implemented. The method finds temperature distributions that simultaneously and self-consistently approximate spatially resolved spectra and narrowband intensity profiles. With this analysis, radially and axially resolved temperature distributions T_e(r,z) have been extracted. Comparisons of T_e(r,z) from multiple experiments help assess how the heating is affected by changes to the laser intensity and window thickness. Furthermore, differences in the results from experiments with and without an external axial magnetic field show the effect of the magnetic field on thermal heat flow.