The Role of Collisionality and Radiative Cooling on the Interactions Between Supersonic Plasma Flows

We present a study on the effects of different collision and radiative cooling rates on the interactions of counter-streaming plasma jets produced by opposed conical wire arrays on the ~200 kA GenASIS driver.
¹
Since ion-ion mean free path scales with jet velocity
$(\mathrm{v}_{\text{jet}}\ ^{4})$
, atomic mass (A
²
), and ionization (Z-4), while cooling scales with atomic number, changing the material of the wire arrays can dramatically alter the collisionality and the radiative cooling rates of the jets. This enabled production of collisional, poorly cooled environments using C, weakly collisional and increasingly strongly cooled interactions using Al and Cu, and strongly cooled, effectively collisionless plasmas using W.