Experimental characterization of a section of a spherically imploding plasma liner formed by merging hypersonic plasma jets

We report experimental results on merging of hypersonic plasma jets, which is the fundamental building block for forming spherically imploding plasma liners as a potential standoff compression driver for mangeto-inertial fusion. Jets are formed and launched by contoured-gap coaxial plasma guns mounted at the six spherical chamber. First, from experiments with two and three merging jets of four different species (N, Ar, Kr, Xe), we show that (1) density spatial non-uniformities can be large (with electron-density jumps ranging from 2.9 for N to 6.6 for Xe) when shocks form upon jet merging, but smaller (density jumps 10), as required for plasma liners to be an effective compression driver. Second, from experiments with six and seven merging jets using Ar, we present results with improved jet-to-jet balance of