Monochromatic x-ray imaging experiments on the Sandia National Laboratories Z facility (invited)

The Z facility is a 20 MA, 100 ns rise time, pulsed power driver for z-pinch plasma radiation sources. The Z facility can make >200 TW, 1-2 MJ, near-blackbody radiation sources through the compression of cylindrical wire arrays. These sources are being used as drivers to study inertial-confinement fusion capsule implosions, complex radiation-hydrodynamic jet experiments, and wire-array z-pinch physics tests. To backlight plasmas in this environment we have built diagnostics based on spherically bent crystals that provide high spatial resolution (9-10 mum), a narrow spectral bandpass (<0.5 eV), and a large field of view (4 mmx20 mm). These diagnostics use the 2 TW, multi-kJ Z-Beamlet laser to produce x-ray emission sources at 1.865 or 6.151 keV for backlighting. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.