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Pulsed power accelerators compress electrical energy in space and time to provide versatile experimental platforms for high energy density and inertial confinement fusion science. The 80-TW “Z” pulsed power facility at Sandia National Laboratories is the largest pulsed power device in the world today. Z discharges up to 22 MJ of energy stored in its capacitor banks into a current pulse that rises in 100 ns and peaks at a current as high as 30 MA in low-inductance cylindrical targets. Considerable progress has been made over the past 15 years in the use of pulsed power as a precision scientific tool. This paper reviews developments at Sandia in inertial confinement fusion, dynamic materials science, x-ray radiation science, and pulsed power engineering, with an emphasis on progress since a previous review of research on Z in Physics of Plasmas in 2005.

The long-range goal of the Z-Pinch IFE program is to produce an economically-attractive power plant using

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The three-dimensional particle-in-cell code quicksilver [Seidel et al., Computational Physics, edited by A. Tenner (World Scientific, Singapore, 1991), p. 475] has been used to study applied-B ion diodes. The impedance behavior of the diode in these simulations is in good agreement with both analytic theory and experiments at peak power. The simulations also demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic instabilities which induce divergence in the ion beam. Early in time, there is an instability at high frequency relative to the ion transit time τi, and the resulting beam divergence is low. However, later in time, the system makes a transition to an instability with a frequency close to 1/τi, and the ion beam divergence rises to an unacceptably high value. The transition is associated with the build-up of electron space charge in the diode, and the resulting increase in the beam current density enhancement (J/JCL). Using different schemes to inhibit the electron evolution, the transition has both been postponed and permanently eliminated, resulting in Li+1 ion beams with a sustained divergence of ∼10 mrad at an energy of ∼10 MeV.