A torquing shearing interferometer for cylindrical wire array experiments.
In standard shearing interferometry, a single probing beam passes through a perturbing medium and is then split into two beams. A linear shift results in an overlap, an interference, and a fringe pattern yielding the perturbing medium density profile. The probing beam usually needs to be larger than the perturbing medium so that part of it passes through a well separated low density region. During early time axial (end-on) views of imploding cylindrical wire arrays low density regions lie in between the high density regions that are near the initial wire positions. In addition, for end-on viewing, the probing beam diameter is limited by electrodes and is comparable to the array diameter. In this case a linear translation will not work but the overlap can be accomplished by an azimuthal rotation of one beam with respect to the other. Such a torquing shearing interferometer has been set up on the COBRA experiment to give time resolved, radial, and azimuthal electron density profiles during early time cylindrical wire array implosions.
Pikuz
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Cornell University, 439 Rhodes Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA. sap17@cornell.edu
Schrafel
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Shelkovenko
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Kusse
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