Investigation of the effect of a power feed vacuum gap in solid liner experiments at 1 MA

• DOI: 10.1063/1.4931049
• Publication Date: 2015-09-18T05:36:56Z
• Authors: S. C. Bott-Suzuki; S. W. Cordaro; L. S. Caballero B...; I. C. Blesener; L. Atoyan; T. Byvank; W. Potter; K. S. Bell; B. R. Kusse; J. B. Greenly; D. A. Hammer
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 01 natural sciences

We present an experimental study of plasma initiation of a solid metal liner at the 1 MA level. In contrast to previous work, we introduce a vacuum gap at one of the liner connections to the power feed to investigate how this affects plasma initiation and to infer how this may affect the symmetry of the liner in compression experiments. We observed that the vacuum gap causes non-uniform plasma initiation both azimuthally and axially in liners, diagnosed by gated optical imaging. Using magnetic field probes external to the liner, we also determined that the optical emission is strongly linked to the current distribution in the liner. The apparent persistent of azimuthal non-uniformities may have implications for fusion-scale liner experiments.