Reply To: Great News!

[asymmetric_implosion]

The direction of the force on the anode is largely 1D but I will let LPP speak about their experiment in detail. I know it was discussed a month or more back when they broke an insulator. I think the force depends on the machine configuration but the shaking comes from magnetic pressure on the electrodes outside of vacuum, switch closure which can be very loud depending on the current in the switch and the plasma shock hitting the vacuum vessel wall. At 60 kA, our switches are nearly silent. The vacuum wall makes most of the noise. Z-pinch machines use more complex pulse power with multiple stages of operation to achieve the 100-200 ns pulse required to drive the Z-pinch.

As far as increasing the duration of the pinch goes, there is one PF-like experiment that demonstrated >1 us confinement. The hypocycloidal pinch, a modified form of a PF, was developed by a researcher at NASA (NASA report TN D-8116). He didn’t use D2 as fuel but found an x-ray pulse that lasted for >1 us. No one picked up the research but it shows promise for stability well in excess of any other Z-pinch device at useful densities. I’d love to build one and test it but the not in the cards for me.