[Gordian Blade]

I tried to ping everyone who I thought might be interested; please forgive the intrusion if I pinged you by mistake. I sent an email to the father of the Z Machine at Sandia Labs, Dr. Gerold Yonas, asking him how things were going. I got a terse reply about a week ago, here it is:

Gary, The Z machine is doing fine, except it is getting old and needs to be upgraded, but there have been some recent improvements in diagnostics and they have been applied to x ray driven target implosion experiments. I am passing on your question to Jeff Quintenz and I am sure he can give you some recent references. Thanks for your interest. Gerry

I didn't get a follow-up note from Dr. Quintenz. I assume from this that they aren't on the brink of anything earth-shattering. There isn't much of recent interest on the subject on the Sandia web site.

[RadioAstronomer]

You have freep mail :)

[patriciaruth]

I wouldn't call that terse. Quick, succinct, but not terse, as terse implies he was irritated with the question, and I don't read that in this note at all.

Thanks for the trouble. Appreciate.
:-)

[Gordian Blade]

I have more information about the Z Machine that you might be interested in, quoting from a recent email to me:

Gerry Yonas passed along your inquiry re: Z. We are continuing to make progress. Most recently, we completed the project to move the Beamlet laser from LLNL (Beamlet was the prototype laser for the national ignition facility). We were successful in reconstructing the laser next to Z and then synchronizing it within 3 ns to the peak radiation output from Z. We then were able, for the first time, to image imploding capsules with a backlighter. We have done some nice symmetry measurements of imploding capsules. We also have been working to refurbish the facility. This year, Congress supplied $10M (the first installment in what we hope to be a $60M total) to begin the refurbishment. When completed, we should have 26 MA into a z pinch (18 MA today) and 350 TW of x-ray power with 2.7 MJ of x-ray energy (200 TW and 1.8 MJ today). This will provide a significant improvement in precision, capacity and capability.

Finally, we are also using the Z facility to generate very high magnetic fields for materials studies. We have achieved 2 Mbar isentropic compression in Al and have launched flyer plates to greater than 26 km/s velocities. All in all a very versatile and useful machine.

Hope this answers your questions. We have a Web site http://www.sandia.gov/pulspowr/PPT.html that is a bit out of date but over the next few months we hope to bring it up to snuff.

Regards,
Jeff Quintenz