Experiment WEX - Wire explosion in water

A new wire explosion driver WEX (Wire EXplosion) with a laser-triggered main spark gap has been designed and built. Our motivation for building such new apparatus was testing of feasibility of amplification of spontaneous emission in soft X-ray region at shorter wavelengths (below 20 nm). One of the ways how to achieve shortening the wavelengths is amplification based on electron-collisional excitation pumping of some metal vapours. Feeding these vapours into capillary is difficult; therefore, metal vapour plasma in a capillary with liquid wall is being prepared. This paper reports on new results characterizing wire explosion in water, namely time dependences of the discharge current, and the XUV/soft X-ray radiation emitted axially by expanding and collapsing plasma channel.