Development of synthetic diagnostics for flow Z-pinch fusion plasmas

Accurate comparisons between simulation and experiment are essential for understanding fusion plasma performance, predicting scaling, and exploring parameter spaces. These analyses are most effective when simulation and experimental data can be directly compared. To this end, we have created a suite of synthetic diagnostics that can immediately be matched against experimental data. We will show how this effort can be used to assess whether transient phenomena or small-scale features observed in simulations are detectable given experimental resolution limits, guiding our experimental development. Our suite of synthetic diagnostics includes magnetic field probes, interferometry, spectroscopy, Thomson scattering, x-ray emission, and imaging diagnostics. We highlight select diagnostics, presenting the working model and demonstrating their fidelity through comparisons with simulation ground truth and validation against experimental data from Zap Energy's fusion devices.