Z-pinch

Another example is an imploding plasma shell in a Z-pinch.

The Z-Pinch has a magnetic field in the θ direction.

Except maybe physicists doing plasma hi-power sparks with Z-pinch.

Z-pinch uses massive amounts of electrical current which is switched into a small number of extremely fine wires.

It was later found that the neutrons were spurious, and UK work on Z-pinch ended in the early 1960s.

The dense plasma column (akin to the Z-pinch) rapidly pinches and undergoes instabilities and breaks up.

"Strong optical attenuation (15db) by a dense hydrogen Z-pinch plasma" Optics Comm.

The Z-pinch is an application of the Lorentz force, in which a current-carrying conductor in a magnetic field experiences a force.

In 1946 Thompson and Blackman submitted a patent for a fusion reactor based on a toroidal z-pinch with an additional vertical magnetic field.

The second test was conducted on the SNL Z-Machine, the world's most powerful x-ray emitter and z-pinch at that time.

Inertial confinement is also attempted in "controlled" nuclear fusion, where the driver is a laser, ion, or electron beam, or a Z-pinch.

But in 1954 Kruskal and Schwarzschild published their theory of MHD instabilities in a z-pinch.

The Mini-Mag Orion system achieves propulsion by compressing fissile material in a magnetic field (a Z-pinch) until fission occurs.

Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM is currently investigating a z-pinch as a possible ignition source for inertial confinement fusion.

Z-pinch is when the glow of the current in the ionized gas spontaneously squeezes itself into a very intense sharp narrow strand, even though it started out wide and diffuse.

An Inertial-Fusion Z-Pinch Power Plant Concept (Sandia Labs)

The MAGPIE project at Imperial College London is used to study wire array Z-pinch implosions.

In 1957 Pease and Braginskii independently predicted radiative collapse in a z-pinch under pressure balance when in hydrogen the current exceeds 1.4 MA.

Early fusion research devices were variants on the Z-pinch and used electrical current to generate a poloidal magnetic field to contain the plasma along a linear axis between two points.

The next major development was the publication in 1934 of an analysis of the radial pressure balance in a static z-pinch by Bennett (See the following section for details.)

Lastly, at Imperial College in 1960, led by R Latham, the Plateau-Rayleigh instability was shown, and its growth rate measured in a dynamic z-pinch."

One simulation showed the cross-section of two plasma filaments joining in a z-pinch, the filaments starting 300,000 light years apart and carrying Birkeland currents of 10 Amps.

According to the simulation, a 70 Mega Amp Z-pinch facility in combination with a Laser may be able to produce spectacular energy return of 1000 times the expended energy.