Pulse shaping of the load current on the Z accelerator

The refurbishment project (ZR) for the Z accelerator at Sandia National Laboratories. McDaniel, DH. et al., (2002) is required to provide the capability to temporally shape the current pulse at the load, primarily for isentropic compression experiments (ICE) Hall, CA. et al., (2001). The baseline design to accomplish this uses staggered triggering of the 36 pulse-forming lines that are added in parallel. With relative timing differences between the lines, and each line run in either a short-pulse mode or a long-pulse mode, there are many degrees of freedom for achieving a required pulse shape at the load. This approach is currently being evaluated with circuit simulations, 3D, particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations, and experiments on Z. Results from these experiments have been very successful.