Pinch (plasma Physics) - History

History

The first creation of a z-pinch in the laboratory may have occurred in 1790 in Holland when Martinus van Marum created an explosion by discharging 100 Leyden jars into a wire. The phenomenon was not understood until 1905, when Pollock and Barraclough investigated a compressed and distorted length of copper tube from a lightning rod after it had been struck by lightning. Their analysis showed that the forces due to the interaction of the large current flow with its own magnetic field could have caused the compression and distortion. A similar, and apparently independent, theoretical analysis of the pinch effect in liquid metals was published by Northrupp in 1907. The next major development was the publication in 1934 of an analysis of the radial pressure balance in a static z-pinch by Bennett (See the following section for details.)

Thereafter, the experimental and theoretical progress on pinches was driven by fusion power research. In their article on the "Wire-array z-pinch: a powerful x-ray source for ICF", M G Haines et al., wrote on the "Early history of z-pinches":

In 1946 Thompson and Blackman submitted a patent for a fusion reactor based on a toroidal z-pinch with an additional vertical magnetic field. But in 1954 Kruskal and Schwarzschild published their theory of MHD instabilities in a z-pinch. In 1956 Kurchatov gave his famous Harwell lecture showing nonthermal neutrons and the presence of m = 0 and m = 1 instabilities in a deuterium pinch. In 1957 Pease and Braginskii independently predicted radiative collapse in a z-pinch under pressure balance when in hydrogen the current exceeds 1.4 MA. (The viscous rather than resistive dissipation of magnetic energy discussed above and in would however prevent radiative collapse). Lastly, at Imperial College in 1960, led by R Latham, the Plateau-Rayleigh instability was shown, and its growth rate measured in a dynamic z-pinch."