Los Alamos/Arzamas-16 collaboration of ultrahigh magnetic fields and ultrahigh energy pulsed power

摘要

The end of the Cold War has made possible some remarkable scientific adventures--joint research projects between scientific institutions of the United States and the Russian Federation. Perhaps most unprecedented of the new partnerships is a formal collaboration which has been established between the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the two institutes which designed the first nuclear weapons for their respective countries. In early 1992, emerging governmental policy in the US and Russia began to encourage ''lab-to-lab'' interactions between the nuclear weapons design laboratories of the two countries. Each government recognized that as nuclear weapons stockpiles and design activities were being reduced, highly qualified scientists were becoming available to use their considerable skills in fundamental scientific research of interest to both nations. VNIIEF and LANL quickly recognized a common interest in the technology and applications of magnetic flux compression, the technique for converting the chemical energy released by high-explosives into intense electrical pulses and intensely concentrated magnetic energy. This document reports on current projects of the collaboration.