Eur. Phys. J. D (2014) 68: 40
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2013-40395-7

Regular Article

Effect of current on multiple pinches of Xe plasma in capillary discharge

¹ National Key Laboratory of Tunable Laser Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150080, P.R. China
² State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130033, P.R. China

^a e-mail: zhaoyp3@yahoo.com.cn

Received: 7 July 2013
Received in final form: 2 August 2013
Published online: 4 March 2014

Abstract

The effect of the current on the pinching process of Xe plasma columns pumped by capillary discharge has been studied theoretically and experimentally. An extreme ultraviolet emission monitor (E-Mon, 13.5 nm in 2% bandwidth) was applied to record the temporal evolution of the 13.5 nm (2% bandwidth) emission. According to real current waveforms, the pinching processes were simulated with the snow-plow model. Both the experimental and the simulation results showed that intensity of the 13.5 nm emission reached the maximum when the plasma was pinched to the minimum radius. The E-Mon signals and the simulations indicated that under different amplitudes of the currents the plasma could be pinched more times and faster with higher discharge current.