Three-dimensional hydromagnetic simulation of a high-velocity gas-puff Z-pinch

Experiments on the Sandia National Laboratories Saturn pulsed power machine have produced high-velocity Z-pinch plasma implosions of krypton gas puffs from a circular nozzle. We use the three-dimensional (3-D), time-dependent MACH3 magnetohydrodynamics code to simulate these experiments. Generally, the quality of Z-pinch implosions is degraded by hydromagnetic Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. The images displayed in this paper illustrate the growth in time of this instability in three spatial dimensions from a modest (and realistic) initial 3-D perturbation.