MHD modeling of conductors at ultrahigh current density

In conjunction with ongoing high-current experiments on Sandia National Laboratories' Z accelerator (Albuquerque, NM) we have revisited a problem first described in detail by Heinz Knoepfel (1970). Unlike the 1-Tesla MITL's of pulsed power accelerators used to produce intense particle beams, Z's disk, transmission line (downstream of the current addition) is in a 100-1200-Tesla regime; so its conductors cannot be modeled simply as static infinite conductivity boundaries. Using the MHD code MACH2 we have been investigating the conductor hydrodynamics, characterizing the joule heating, magnetic field diffusion, and material deformation, pressure, and velocity over a range of current densities, current rise-times, and conductor materials. The three purposes of this work are 1) to quantify power flow losses owing to ultrahigh magnetic fields, 2) to model the response of VISAR diagnostic samples in various configurations on Z, and 3) to incorporate the most appropriate equation of state and conductivity models into our magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) computations. Certain features are strongly dependent on the details of the conductivity model     

The effect of an initial load twist on Rayleigh-Taylor instabilitygrowth and X-ray radiation of wire-array Z-pinches

Initially twisted multiwire Z-pinch loads (Volkov et al., 1998; Golub, 1999) are expected to significantly improve the performance of these X-ray sources. A model based on the self-consistent simulation of the dynamics of a twisted plasma shell and the development of Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) perturbations on a plasma surface is proposed to quantitatively study the effect of various physical factors on the generation of X-rays. The model provides us with a tool for the analysis of processes that occur during the implosion of the plasma-shell-wire-core system. We plan for the RT perturbations to break through the plasma shell at the moment when the internal radius of a shell becomes zero, where the greatest possible values of kinetic energy and X-ray radiation power ought to be obtained. The results of numerical simulations for the Sandia National Laboratories' Z-generator are presented and discussed     

Resonantly enhanced tunneling in a double layer quantum hall ferromagnet

The tunneling conductance between two parallel 2D electron systems has been measured in a regime of strong interlayer Coulomb correlations. At total Landau level filling nuT=1 the tunnel spectrum changes qualitatively when the boundary separating the compressible phase from the ferromagnetic quantized Hall state is crossed. A huge resonant enhancement replaces the strongly suppressed equilibrium tunneling characteristic of weakly coupled layers. The possible relationship of this enhancement to the Goldstone mode of the broken symmetry ground state is discussed.     

Observation of quantized Hall drag in a strongly correlated bilayer electron system

The frictional drag between parallel two-dimensional electron systems has been measured in a regime of strong interlayer correlations. When the bilayer system enters the excitonic quantized Hall state at total Landau level filling factor nu(T) = 1, the longitudinal component of the drag vanishes but a strong Hall component develops. The Hall drag resistance is observed to be accurately quantized at h/e(2).     

Resistivity of dilute 2D electrons in an undoped GaAs heterostructure

We report resistivity measurements from 0.03 to 10 K in a dilute high mobility 2D electron system. Using an undoped GaAs/AlGaAs heterojunction in a gated field-effect transistor geometry, a wide range of densities, 0.16 x 10(10) to 7.5 x 10(10) cm(-2), are explored. For high densities, the results are quantitatively shown to be due to scattering by acoustic phonons and impurities. In an intermediate range of densities, a peak in the resistivity is observed for temperatures below 1 K. This nonmonotonic resistivity can be understood by considering the known scattering mechanisms of phonons, bulk, and interface ionized impurities. Still lower densities appear insulating to the lowest temperature measured.     

Mott-insulator transition in a two-dimensional atomic Bose gas

Cold atoms in periodic potentials are versatile quantum systems for implementing simple models prevalent in condensed matter theory. Here we realize the 2D Bose-Hubbard model by loading a Bose-Einstein condensate into an optical lattice, and study the resulting Mott insulator. The measured momentum distributions agree quantitatively with theory (no adjustable parameters). In these systems, the Mott insulator forms in a spatially discrete shell structure which we probe by focusing on correlations in atom shot noise. These correlations show a marked dependence on the lattice depth, consistent with the changing size of the insulating shell expected from simple arguments.