Overview of the NRL DPF program: Experiment and Modeling
POSTER
Abstract
Charged particle acceleration in imploding plasmas is an important phenomenon which occurs in various natural and laboratory plasmas. A new research project at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has been started to investigate this phenomenon both experimentally---in a dense plasma focus (DPF) device---and theoretically using analytical and computational modeling. The DPF will be driven by the high-inductance (607 nH) Hawk pulsed-power generator, with a rise time of 1.2 $\mu$s and a peak current of 665 kA. In this poster we present an overview of the research project, and some preliminary results from fluid simulations of the m = 0 instability in an idealized DPF pinch.
*This work was supported by the Naval Research Laboratory Base Program.