A description of the achievement, as well as a possible explanation by Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines, well-known for his work in Z pinches at the Imperial College in London, appeared in the Feb. 24 Physical Review Letters.
Texas A&M in collaboration with Lawrenceville Plasma Physics achieved a similar result in 2001 with a plasma focus device, rather than a wire z pinch as done by Sandia. They also achieved 200 keV, but with just 1.4 mega amp input in comparison to Sandia's 20 MA input. (Ref1, Ref2)
What happened and why?
Zs energies in these experiments raised several questions.
First, the radiated x-ray output was as much as four times the expected kinetic energy input.
Ordinarily, in non-nuclear reactions, output energies are less not greater than the total input energies. More energy had to be getting in to balance the books, but from where could it come?
Second, and more unusually, high ion temperatures were sustained after the plasma had stagnated that is, after its ions had presumably lost motion and therefore energy and therefore heat as though yet again some unknown agent was providing an additional energy source to the ions.
[This is academic parlance for (do I dare say it?) "over unity".]
Sandias Z machine normally works like this: 20 million amps of electricity pass through a small core of vertical tungsten wires finer than human hairs. The core is about the size of a spool of thread. The wires dissolve instantly into a cloud of charged particles called a plasma.
The plasma, caught in the grip of the very strong magnetic field accompanying the electrical current, is compressed to the thickness of a pencil lead. This happens very rapidly, at a velocity that would fly a plane from New York to San Francisco in several seconds.
