Investigation of the Ionizing Radiation Efficiency and Spectra from 1.2 MJ Plasma Focus Device and its Applications

This report presents a summary of experimental results obtained with the PF-1000 plasma-focus device, which was operated at energy 0.6 MJ. In the following sections a progress in studies of a different plasma-focus phases are given. Some theoretical models of the initial breakdown, which occurs at the insulator surface, are compared in Section 2. It is pointed out that modeling of the breakdown is sensitive to kinetics of ionization processes and transport coefficients. Particular attention has been paid to correlation between pinch evolution and the emission of pulsed X ray, fast electron beams, and fusion produced neutrons. Progress in experimental studies of the axial acceleration phase is unsatisfactory. Important experimental data have been collected, but new measurements are still needed. For the radial collapse phase it was shown that the MHD modeling is efficient until the maximum compression, but plasma instabilities require more sophisticated approaches. The pinch phase was investigated by means of different diagnostics. Fusion neutron yields were measured in different experiments, but some discrepancies in scaling must still be explained. The conclusions concern the main results obtained from different experiments performed with the PF-1000 device in the last few years. (author)