Compactness with which fast liners can be accelerated in Angara-5-1

The compactness with which multiwire liners and annular gas jets with an initially nonuniform density distribution can be accelerated is compared with the behavior of porous annular clouds having an initially uniform density distribution. For multiwire liners with a number of wires N < R0/r0 (here R0 is the initial liner radius and r0 is the transverse dimension of an individual exploding wire) in the absence of preionization the wires cannot be accelerated compactly. An annular xenon jet with a mass per unit length ∼ 150 μg/cm develops a compact cloud and yields a soft x-ray pulse of length 10 ns. Even in the absence of effective preionization, porous annular liners with a small initial radius (R0 ∼ 2 mm) comparable with the skin depth (∼ 1 mm) can exhibit active liner compression dynamics with a radiation pulse length τ ≤ 30 ns. It is proposed to use the electron leakage currents in the magnetically insulated lines to preionize solid nonconducting shells. 13 refs., 7 figs