In this research, we generated helical instability modes using unseeded and kink-seeded, non-imploding liner-plasmas at the 1 MA Linear Transformer Driver facility at the University of Michigan in order to determine the effects of externally applied, axial magnetic fields. In order to minimize the coupling of sausage and helical modes to the magneto Rayleigh-Taylor instability, the 400 nm-thick aluminum liners were placed directly around straight-cylindrical (unseeded) or threaded-cylindrical (kink-seeded) support structures to prevent implosion. The evolution of the instabilities was imaged using a combination of laser shadowgraphy and visible self-emission, collected by a 12-frame fast intensified CCD camera. With no axial magnetic field, the unseeded liners developed an azimuthally correlated m = 0 sausage instability (m is the azimuthal mode number). Applying a small external axial magnetic field of 1.1 T (compared to peak azimuthal field of 30 T) generated a smaller amplitude, helically oriented instability structure that is interpreted as an m = +2 helical mode. The kink-seeded liners showed highly developed helical structures growing at the seeded wavelength of lambda = 1.27 mm. It was found that the direction of the axial magnetic field played an important role in determining the overall stabilization effects; modes with helices spiraling in the opposite direction of the global magnetic field showed the strongest stabilization. Finally, the Weis-Zhang analytic theory [Weis et al., Phys. Plasmas 22, 032706 (2015)] is used to calculate sausage and helical growth rates for experimental parameters in order to study the effects of axial magnetic fields. Published by AIP Publishing.
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