A heuristic model of the wire array Z-pinch

Recent experimental results at the Sandia National Laboratory (e.g., Sanford et al. (1996)) have shown that the X-ray power increases as the number of wires n employed is increased, with a sharper increase in power when the wire gap is below a critical value. This paper proposes a model that can not only explain these phenomena, but also shows how the initial perturbations that lead to the Rayleigh-Taylor instability scale as n/sup -1/2/. The model predicts the shell thickness at merger of the expanding separate wires which will mainly determine the final pinch radius. The largest amplitude Rayleigh-Taylor mode at the pinch time is also found, in reasonable agreement with experiment.