Doug White wrote:

Keywords:
In article k.net, cavelamb himself wrote:

Jon Elson wrote:

See articles about
the "Z Machine"
http://www.sandia.gov/media/z290.htm
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_machine

The Z machine is just a bit bigger than the coin shrinker, I believe
they were running 320,000 A at 90,000 V in some previous
work. Love that picture with the arcs over the pool of water.

Jon

The most recent advance resulted in an output X-ray power of about 290
trillion watts -- for billionths of a second, about 80 times the entire
world's output of electricity.


A very long time ago (1969?), I got a tour of Sandia Labs. They showed
us the pulse X-ray machine they had at the time, along with a 1/16" thick
sheet of tantalum they had blown a dime sized hole in with a beam of
x-rays. It was all wrinkled & distorted around the hole with bits of
splatter. Very impressive. They had a lot of other neat toys. I expect
that almost 40 years of research has improved on them by quite a bit.

Doug White

Me too...

I watched a powerfull "flash X-ray" machine at a GE lab in Pennsylvania
about 20 years ago. It had a large horizontal Van de Graff generator
maybe 20 feet in length which chuffed away for several minutes charging
up some monster capacitors until they fired the thing off. It made quite
a BANG when it let go.

The place I was with was contracting with them to check the "radiation
hardness" of some GPS satellite electronics I had a hand in. (But not
while they were flashing it. G)

Jeff

--
Jeffry Wisnia
(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)
The speed of light is 1.8*10^12 furlongs per fortnight.