Initiation, ablation, precursor formation, and instability analysis of thin foil copper liners

Summary form only given. Solid liners are an attractive load design for use with magnetized liner inertial fusion (MagLIF) and for possible replacement of wire-array Z-pinches on large pulsed-power drivers. Experiments have been conducted on COBRA, our 1 MA, 100 ns rise time pulsed power generator, to investigate three aspects that can affect liner performance: initiation; ablation and precursor formation; and instability development.