Observation and analysis of broadband XUV emission spectra from Al Z-pinch plasmas driven by the 1MA Zebra pulsed power generator

We report the observation and analysis of XUV line emission spectra from Al wire-array z-pinch implosion plasmas in the range of 40Å – 700Å using the 1MA Zebra pulse power generator at the University of Nevada, Reno. The cylindrical wire-arrays were 6 mm in diameter, 21 mm tall and comprised of 8 15m-thick wires. The x-ray emission at the collapse of the implosion was recorded with an Acton grazing incidence, diffraction grating spectrograph equipped with a 1.5 m-radius 600 lines/mm aluminum spherical grating. The time and space integrated observation was recorded with a microchannel plate detector. The intensity distribution displays line emission and a quasi-Planckian envelope characteristic of a partially thermalized radiation source. To interpret the spectrum, three-dimensional simulations of the z-pinch implosion were performed with the Gorgon magnetohydrodynamics code, and the time-history of temperature and density spatial distributions were post-processed with SPECT3D to compute synthetic spectra. The comparison of experimental and synthetic spectra indicates that line emission is dominated by L-shell transitions in several ions and provides insight about the spectra formation.



This work was sponsored by DOE NNSA HEDLP grant DE-NA0004038.