Ion beam measurements in a small plasma focus operating in hydrogen/gas mixtures

Abstract

Dense transient plasmas of high energy density, can be easily produced in a plasma focus device, on a cost effective basis. High energy ion beam emission is one, among several others, of the very interesting transient plasma phenomena observed in plasma focus discharges. Although some of the properties of these ion beams have been investigated in the past, the physical mechanisms involved in their generation are still not clear, and further investigations are required on order to establish the exact correlations of the ion beam emission with other plasma focus phenomena. We present a preliminary series of measurements on ion beams in a plasma focus operating with hydrogen/gas mixtures, using an XRD probe array, which allows the characteristic ion energy to be determined from the time of flight across the probe array, and the time of the ion beam emission to be correlated with plasma emission events associated with the soft X-ray pulses detected by the probes.