Reply To: Global Warming

[Lerner]

Assymetric, You raise a lot of good points. First, we do include the tip of the anode in the field of view—about half the circumference is visible to our detectors. Your images show that something is lighting it up in x-ray emission. For our first x-ray pulse, it is hard to rule out some contribution, but I am not sure it is large. You can’t see the pinch, but we have four times as much current as you and the x-ray output will scale as I^5, while the beam energy will be about I^3, so relatively our pinch will be brighter. It is hard to see how the edge of the beam can be very bright, since from the damage done to the anode it looks like the beam is a Gaussian that is at most 20 degrees in half width, so at 90 degrees it should be pretty weak.
For our x-ray pinhole imaging we did not try integrating many shots—we should. So far we did not get an image with single shots.
We are sure our x-ray pulses are not gammas from neutrons hitting the vacuum chamber wall. The neutrons clearly come later than the first x-ray pulse.
The step wedge idea seems a good one. Do you have any references on that?