UV Laser Probing of Imploding Wire-Array Plasmas on the Angara-5-1 Facility

Dynamics of tungsten wire-array Z-pinch implosions driven by a current of 3 MA has been studied on the Angara-5-1 facility by using a UV laser probe developed in the Institute of Nuclear Physics and Chemistry. The single-wire-array results including implosion trajectory, an implosion velocity of 3.7 X 10 7 cm/s, and a minimum pinch size of no more than 0.9 mm were obtained. The numerical analysis indicates that the measured trajectory, velocity, and minimum pinch size were of the plasma with electron density of the order of 2 times 10 20 cm -3 .