Transient electrical discharges in small devices
Leopoldo Soto · Andrey Esaulov · José Moreno · Patricio Silva · Gustavo Sylvester · Marcelo Zambra · Andrey Nazarenko · Alejandro Clausse
Abstract and summary · read the original at the source · none found
In one page
Big plasma machines cost what a building costs. Leopoldo Soto and his colleagues at the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission, working with Andrey Esaulov, Andrey Nazarenko and Alejandro Clausse, make the case that you do not always need one. Plasmas at high energy density — the unstable, radiating kind that fusion and X-ray work care about — can be produced in small pinch devices at relatively low cost, and this paper walks through three of them. A capillary discharge, where the current is forced through a narrow bore. A Z-pinch driven by a small generator, where the current squeezes its own column. And a low-energy plasma focus, where a sheet of current runs down two coaxial electrodes and collapses onto the axis. Each was built alongside magnetohydrodynamic calculations that both guided the design and made sense of the data, and each was watched with a full diagnostic kit: current and voltage monitors, a multipinhole camera, holographic interferometry and vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy.
Why it matters hereThis is the programme paper behind the small-device work chapter 9 keeps returning to — the statement, in 2001, that dense unstable radiating plasma is a bench subject and not only a national-laboratory subject. Chapter 12 cares for the same reason: everything downstream on this site waits on a compact high-density source, and a compact source has to be built and diagnosed by somebody first.
What it claims
01Fundamental and applied research on plasmas with high energy density that are unstable and radiate can be carried out at relatively low cost with small plasma pinches.Abstract, sentence 1
Published and peer-reviewed02The paper treats three small pinch devices as one subject: a capillary discharge, a Z-pinch driven by a small generator, and a low energy plasma focus.Abstract, sentence 2
Published and peer-reviewed03The experiments were complemented by magnetohydrodynamic numerical calculations, used both to assist the design of the devices and to interpret the experimental data physically — so the modelling is part of the instrument, not a commentary added afterwards.Abstract, sentence 3
Published and peer-reviewed04The diagnostics used across the three experiments were current and voltage monitors, a multipinhole camera, holographic interferometry, and vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy — that is, the electrical drive, the spatial structure of the emission, the electron density and the spectrum were all recorded on the same small machines.Abstract, sentence 4
Published and peer-reviewed05What to watch: the open question this survey sets up is how far down the scale the physics survives — whether the dynamics, pinch conditions and electron densities of large pinch machines are still reached when the stored energy falls to hundreds and then tens of joules. The same Santiago laboratory answered it experimentally over the following decade, first at a few hundred joules and then at tens.Abstract, read against the group’s later hundreds-of-joules and tens-of-joules results
What to watch
Read it · abstract
Abstract
Fundamental and applied research on plasmas with high energy density that are unstable and radiate can be done at a relatively low cost with small plasma pinches. In this paper we discuss three experiments using small pinch devices: a capillary discharge, a Z-pinch driven by a small generator, and a low energy plasma focus. The experiments were complemented by magnetohydrodynamics numerical calculations in order to assist the design and physical interpretation of the experimental data. The diagnostics used in the experiments include current and voltage monitors, multipinhole camera, holographic interferometry, and vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy.
Leopoldo Soto, Andrey Esaulov, José Moreno, Patricio Silva, Gustavo Sylvester, Marcelo Zambra, Andrey Nazarenko and Alejandro Clausse, all of the Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear, Casilla 188-D, Santiago, Chile, Transient electrical discharges in small devices, Physics of Plasmas 8, issue 5, pages 2572 to 2578, 1 May 2001. The published article is at doi.org/10.1063/1.1351829.
(Abstract only — see the rights note above. On this site, the same group’s hundreds-of-joules neutron-emitting plasma focus is at /library/stm-7b39e3fe45, the tens-of-joules machine that followed it is at /library/stm-0291726f47 and /library/stm-914ae7ba20, the runaway-electron model of hard X-rays from a small focus is at /library/stm-89b2dbcf3b, and the Lee model code the field fits its current traces with is at /library/stm-a9cc428c6d.)
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1351829SOURCE NOT REACHED — this page is written from the authors’ own abstract and the bibliographic record, and says so. Published as Physics of Plasmas volume 8, issue 5, pages 2572 to 2578, dated 1 May 2001, by the plasma physics group of the Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear in Santiago. Unpaywall records the article as bronze open access at the publisher and lists a repository deposit of the submitted manuscript at CONICET Digital under handle 11336/136317 with a cc-by-nc-sa label, but on 8 September 2026 neither could be reached: the AIP article PDF answers 403 and its scitation address returns an interstitial page, and the CONICET repository answered with a service-unavailable notice in Spanish. Unpaywall’s licence label for a repository deposit is a metadata guess, not a statement in the article, so it is not treated as a Creative Commons grant here. Every claim below is taken from the abstract as deposited by AIP with Crossref. No Creative Commons statement appears in any record, so AIP’s copyright stands and nothing beyond the abstract is reproduced.
How to cite it
Leopoldo Soto, Andrey Esaulov, José Moreno, Patricio Silva, Gustavo Sylvester, Marcelo Zambra, Andrey Nazarenko, Alejandro Clausse (2001) Transient electrical discharges in small devices. doi:10.1063/1.1351829
Where it sits in the curriculum
Plasmoids, charge clusters and the orbsLattice confinement fusion