Experimental characterization of a section of a spherically imploding plasma liner formed by merging hypersonic plasma jets

摘要: We report experimental results on merging of hypersonic plasma jets, which is the fundamental building block for forming spherically imploding liners as a potential standoff compression driver mangeto-inertial fusion. Jets are formed and launched by contoured-gap coaxial guns mounted at six spherical chamber. First, from experiments with two three jets four different species (N, Ar, Kr, Xe), we show that (1) density spatial non-uniformities can be large (with electron-density jumps ranging 2.9 N to 6.6 Xe) when shocks form upon jet merging, but smaller (density 10), required an effective driver. Second, seven using present improved jet-to-jet balance <2% across including evidence substantially increased in symmetry liner structure, (2) potentially favorable changes jet-merging morphology addition seventh jet. For both experiments, comparison between synthetic data three-dimensional hydrodynamic codes.