5,300 research outputs found
Multi-chord fiber-coupled interferometer with a long coherence length laser
This paper describes a 561 nm laser heterodyne interferometer that provides
time-resolved measurements of line-integrated plasma electron density within
the range of 10^15-10^18 cm^(-2). Such plasmas are produced by railguns on the
Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX), which aims to produce \mu s-, cm-, and
Mbar-scale plasmas through the merging of thirty plasma jets in a spherically
convergent geometry. A long coherence length, 320 mW laser allows for a strong,
sub-fringe phase-shift signal without the need for closely-matched probe and
reference path lengths. Thus only one reference path is required for all eight
probe paths, and an individual probe chord can be altered without altering the
reference or other probe path lengths. Fiber-optic decoupling of the probe
chord optics on the vacuum chamber from the rest of the system allows the probe
paths to be easily altered to focus on different spatial regions of the plasma.
We demonstrate that sub-fringe resolution capability allows the interferometer
to operate down to line-integrated densities of order 10^15 cm^(-2).Comment: submitted to Rev. Sci. Instrum. (2011
Bounce-free spherical hydrodynamic implosion
In a bounce-free spherical hydrodynamic implosion, the post-stagnation hot
core plasma does not expand against the imploding flow. Such an implosion
scheme has the advantage of improving the dwell time of the burning fuel,
resulting in a higher fusion burn-up fraction. The existence of bounce-free
spherical implosions is demonstrated by explicitly constructing a family of
self-similar solutions to the spherically symmetric ideal hydrodynamic
equations. When applied to a specific example of plasma liner driven
magneto-inertial fusion, the bounce-free solution is found to produce at least
a factor of four improvement in dwell time and fusion energy gain.Comment: accepted by Phys. Plasmas (Nov. 7, 2011); for Ref. 11, please see
ftp://ftp.lanl.gov/public/kagan/liner_evolution.gi
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