Design and primary results of x-ray heating aluminum foil experiments at PTS facility

The strong X-ray radiations produced by mega-ampere-current-level fast Z-pinch plasmas offer valuable and indispensible opportunities to create hot and dense radiation-heated plasmas
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, serving the laboratory investigations of radiation sciences in the fields of opacity measurements, photon-ionized plasmas and so on. Recently, experiments of x-ray heating aluminum foil has been designed and is being carried out at the Primary Test Stand (PTS) facility
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, a 8–10 MA, 70 ns pulsed power driver being able to generate x-ray bursts of 80 TW peak power and 3–5 ns FWHM
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. In this paper, we present the simulation results of the aluminum foils heated by x-rays using a 1D radiation hydrodynamic code, the design of the sample foils with CH coatings on each side and the diagnostic results of x-ray power and energy in different spectral regions, transmission spectra through the foils and so on. By analyzing the measurements, the states and properties of the radiation-heated aluminum plasmas are estimated and discussed.