The Z machine, Z Pulsed Power Facility, is the largest X-ray generator in the world and is designed to test materials in conditions of extreme temperature and pressure. Since its refurbishment in October 1996 it has been used primarily as an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research facility. Operated by Sandia National Laboratories, it gathers data to aid in Computer modeling of nuclear weapons and eventual nuclear fusion pulsed power plants. The Z machine is located at Sandia's main site in Albuquerque, New Mexico.The Z machine origins can be traced from the United States Department of Energy need to replicate in a lab environment the fusion reactions of a thermonuclear bomb, to better understand the physics involved.
The Z machine uses the well known principle of Z-pinch where the fast discharge of capacitors in a tube causes its collapse towards its centerline, under the influence of Lorentz forces (current, magnetic field, force).
The Z machine layout is cylindrical. On the outside it houses huge capacitors discharging in Marx generators which discharge in about one microsecond. Yonas then uses a system to divide this time by a factor 10, using the dielectricpower of water, to enable the creation of 100ns discharges.
At the beginning of 2006, the Z machine produced plasmas with announced temperatures in excess of 2 billion kelvins (2 GK, 2×109 K) or 3.6 billion °F, even reaching a peak at 3.7 GK or 6.6 billion °F. It was achieved in part by replacing the tungsten wires with thicker steel wires. This temperature, which enables a 10% to 15% efficiency in converting electrical energy to soft x-rays, was much higher than anticipated (3 to 4 times the kinetic energy of the incoming wires on axis). The Guinness Book Of Records formerly listed it as the highest human-achieved temperature (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider have since produced higher temperatures). The origin of this extra energy still remains unexplained, but it has been theorized that small-scale MHD turbulence and viscous damping would convert magnetic energy into thermal energy of the ions, which then would transfer their energy to the electrons through collisions. (source WIkipedia)
The puzzle:
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