Ion acceleration and neutron production in hybrid gas-puff z-pinches on the GIT-12 and HAWK generators

Z-pinch experiments with a hybrid configuration of a deuterium gas puff have been carried out on theHAWK(NRL,Washington,DC)and GIT-12(IHCE,Tomsk)pulsed power generators at 0.7 MA and 3MA currents,respectively.On GIT-12,neutron yields reached an average value of 231012 neutrons,and deuterons were accelerated up to an energy of 30 MeV.This was 50 times the ion energy provided by the generator driving voltage of 0.6 MV and the highest energy observed in z-pinches and dense plasma foci.To confirm these unique results independently on another device,we performed several experimental campaigns on theHAWKgenerator.Comparison of the experiments onGIT-12 andHAWKhelped us to understand which parameters are essential for optimized neutron production.Since theHAWKgenerator is of a similar pulsed power architecture as GIT-12,the experiments on GIT-12 and HAWK are important for the study of how charged-particle acceleration scales with the current.