Magnetized Plasma Gun Development for the PLX PJMIF Project

We present a description of the engineering and technical development of magnetized plasma target guns for the Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX) project [1,2,3]. Each target gun incorporates a high power, pulsed magnet coil designed to provide linked magnetic flux between gun electrodes in the plasma formation region such that the resultant hydrogen plasma jet exits the gun with an embedded magnetic field. Individual target gun performance achieved goals of magnetized hydrogen plasma jets with ∼3 x 10¹⁴ cm^-3 density, ∼100 km/s velocity, and embedded field of ∼1 kG, but the resultant jets had an higher-than-expected level of impurities from the ceramic insulator, resulting in ∼3% impurity fraction in two-gun collision experiments. This impurity fraction must be reduced to limit radiation losses during near-term target compression experiments at PLX. More detailed target modeling also revealed that increased jet velocity was needed to achieve the desired target stagnation temperature for the integrated experiment at LANL. Two-jet collision experiments are ongoing in effort to address these issues, with the goal of merging magnetized dueterium plasma jets with velocities of ∼140 km/s to form a magnetized target plasma with ≤0.5% impurity species, diagnosing stagnation parameters and comparing to simulations.