US RUSSIAN COLLABORATION IN HIGH-ENERGY-DENSITY PHYSICS USING HIGH-EXPLOSIVE PULSED-POWER - ULTRAHIGH CURRENT EXPERIMENTS, ULTRAHIGH MAGNETIC-FIELD APPLICATIONS, AND PROGRESS TOWARD CONTROLLED THERMONUCLEAR FUSION/

A collaboration has been established between the All-Russian Scientifi c Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF) and the Los Alam os National Laboratory (LANL), the two institutes which designed the f irst nuclear weapons for their respective countries, In 1992, when eme rging governmental policy in the United States and Russia began to enc ourage ''lab-to-lab'' interactions, the two institutes quickly recogni zed a common interest in the technology and applications of magnetic f lux compression, the technique for converting the chemical energy rele ased by high-explosives into intense electrical pulses and intensely c oncentrated magnetic energy, In a period of just over three years, the two institutes have performed more than fifteen joint experiments cov ering research areas ranging from basic pulsed power technology to sol id-state physics to controlled thermonuclear fusion, Using magnetic fl ux compression generators, electrical currents ranging from 20 to 100 MA were delivered to loads of interest in high-energy-density physics, A 20-MA pulse was delivered to an imploding liner load with a 10-90% rise time of 0.7 mu s. A new, high-energy concept for soft X-ray gener ation was tested at 65 MA. More than 20 MJ of implosion kinetic energy was delivered to a condensed matter imploding liner by a 100-MA curre nt pulse. Magnetic flux compressors were used to determine the upper c ritical field of a high-temperature superconductor and to create press ure high enough that the transition from single particle behavior to q uasimolecular behavior was observed in solid argon, A major step was t aken toward the achievement of controlled thermonuclear fusion by a re latively unexplored approach known in Russia as MAGO (MAGnitnoye Obzha tiye, or ''magnetic compression'') and in the United States as MTF (Ma gnetized Target Fusion), Many of the characteristics of a target plasm a that produced 10(13) fusion neutrons have been evaluated, Computatio nal models of the target plasma suggest that the plasma is suitable fo r subsequent compression to fusion conditions by an imploding pusher.