Research Equipment Grant: Diagnostics of Hot Capillary Discharge Plasmas for Efficient Soft X-Ray Sources

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9412106 Rocca The Department of Electrical Engineering at Colorado State University proposed the construction of an x-ray streak camera/stigmatic spectrograph combination to be utilized as a powerful diagnostics tool in the development of efficient new sources of x-ray radiation based on fast capillary discharges. Important technological and scientifiv applications require the development of efficient and compact sources of x-ray radiation. Results of recent experiments conducted at Colorado State University show that very fast discharge excitation of capillary channels with risetimes of the order of 10ns can generate dense plasma columns with electron temperatures of a few hundred eV utilizing currents that are more than an order of magnitude smaller than those utilized to generate hot plasmas in Terawatt pulse power machines. Such capability for efficiently generating plasma columns of small diameter (=200um) by direct discharge excitation could provide a new route towards compact and efficient soft x-ray lasers. Also, the direct transfer of electrically stored energy into reproducible hot capillary plasmas of small diameters could result in a compact and efficient source of incoherent x-rays. The proposed instrument will image into a flat field with high spatial and spectral resolution the soft x-ray radiation emitted by the capillary discharge. An x-ray camera, placed in the focal plane of the stigmatic spectrograph will provide for temporal resolution necessary to map the evolution of the soft x-ray radiation in a single shot. This combination will constitute a powerful instrument to identify line amplification as well to characterize the dynamics of these promising plasmas which are presently significantly less understood than laser created plasmas. The novel design of the proposed instrument will also for rapidly reconfiguring it into two additional complementary modes of operation to generate: a) sets of simultaneously acquired spatially resolved spectra and b) electronically reco rded pinhole images of the plasma. ***