Turbulent stagnation in a z-pinch plasma

Abstract

The ion kinetic energy in a stagnating plasma was previously determined by Kroupp et al. (Kroupp et al., 2011), from Doppler-dominated lineshapes augmented by measurements of plasma properties and assuming a uniform-plasma model. Notably, the energy was found to be dominantly stored in hydrodynamic flow. Here, we advance a new description of this stagnation as supersonically turbulent. Such turbulence implies a non-uniform density distribution. We demonstrate how to re-analyze the spectroscopic data consistent with the turbulent picture, and show this leads to better concordance of the overconstrained spectroscopic measurements, while also substantially lowering the inferred mean density.