Investigation on the scaling of magneto-Rayleigh–Taylor instability to the current rise time of Z-pinch plasmas

Abstract Understanding how the magneto-Rayleigh–Taylor instability (MRTI) scales to the current rise time is vital for Z-pinch dynamic hohlraum driven inertial confinement fusion. Wang et al discovered in prior theoretical work that the perturbation amplitude of MRTI before stagnation increases linearly with the current rise time when the implosion velocity of Z-pinch plasma is held constant. In the present work, three types of wire-array experiments with similar implosion dynamics and constant implosion velocity are performed on an 8 MA pulse power generator to investigate the scaling of MRTI to the rise time. It is successfully accomplished for the first time to obtain the similar wire-array Z-pinch implosions in which the current rise time is scaled up to three times on the generator by controlling the trigger time of its 24 modules. Both the experimental results, which include x-ray radiation pulses and x-ray images of imploding plasmas, and the related numerical analysis have shown that the MRTI before stagnation grows linearly with the rise time, as predicted by the theoretical model.