Research on Short Duration Pulsed Radiation Sources.

A nitrogen laser which combined the 'Nanolite' pulser with a resonator geometry resulted in a low threshold (3.3 kV) and a 100 kW laser output in the case of a 14 kV pulse voltage. Thus the energy conversion efficiency rose to 0.35%. The beam divergence was reduced to approximately 1 mrad by the resonator. This represents considerable progress in regard to efficient, low voltage and high repetition rate nitrogen laser operation. The study to correlate soft X-ray spots with the hard radiation in a 1 kJ plasma focus showed that field structures leading to the appearance of soft X-ray spots are always present in this plasma focus. These field structures represent m = 0 plasma instabilities and do have a direct influence upon the observed neutron emission. (Author)