Guest Editorial Special Issue on Z-Pinch Plasmas

This special issue on Z-pinch plasmas in the IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science is the seventh to be published [1] – [6] , starting with the first one with Guest Editors J. Davis and C. Deeney in 1998. The publication of so many special issues in just 20 years is a testament to the continued vitality and variety of research in the area of pulsed-power-driven loads. The present Special Issue grew out of interest to record the 10th Dense Z-Pinch Conference held in Stateline, NV, USA, during August 2017. In addition to papers from attendees at this conference, the submission was open to other scientists who wanted to archive their research. As a consequence, this Special Issue has the largest number of published papers compared to previous ones. In addition to authors from the USA, there are articles from the U.K., Russia, China, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Chile. The topics in this collection of Z-pinch research cover a broad range of load designs and applications: liners and foils; wire arrays; X-pinches; gas puffs; dense plasma foci (DPF); diagnostics; and devices and pulsed-power facilities—comprising many theoretical and simulation studies together with experimental findings. Most of the papers arise from work or study with university class drivers, ~1 MA and 100–200-ns implosion times, and there are a few reports of pinches on multi-mega-ampere (MA) generators.