Radiative Properties of Implosions of Stainless Steel Wire Arrays with Application to Astrophysics

Experiments with different stainless steel (SS) wire loads were performed on the 1 MA Zebra Z‐pinch generator at University of Nevada, Reno. The wire array loads consisted of 7.6 μm SS wires and had 10 wires for the planar wire array with an interwire gap of 1 mm and 8 wires for the cylindrical wire array of a 16 mm diameter. In addition, a single‐wire experiment with a 25 μm SS wire was carried out. The different wire loads were used to provide a broader spectrum of plasma conditions. Time‐integrated and time‐gated x‐ray images, as well as time‐integrated, spatially‐resolved and spatially‐integrated x‐ray spectra, were collected and analyzed. Both K‐shell and L‐shell radiation were recorded using LiF and KAP crystal spectrometers, respectively. Non‐LTE kinetic models of Fe and Ni are employed to derive plasma parameters. For axially resolved L‐shell spectra, the resulting electron temperatures are between 230 and 300 eV (higher near the cathode) and electron densities vary from 1019 to 1020 cm−3 dependen...