Z Machine - Two Billion Degrees

Two Billion Degrees

At the beginning of 2006, the Z machine produced plasmas with announced temperatures in excess of 2 billion kelvins (2 GK, 2×109 K) or 3.6 billion °F, even reaching a peak at 3.7 GK or 6.6 billion °F. It was achieved in part by replacing the tungsten wires with thicker steel wires. This temperature, which enables a 10% to 15% efficiency in converting electrical energy to soft x-rays, was much higher than anticipated (3 to 4 times the kinetic energy of the incoming wires on axis). The Guinness Book Of Records listed it as the highest human-achieved temperature (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory has produced higher temperatures, but only within nuclear matter; also the Large Hadron Collider has produced higher temperatures). The origin of this extra energy still remains unexplained, but it has been theorized that small-scale MHD turbulence and viscous damping would convert magnetic energy into thermal energy of the ions, which then would transfer their energy to the electrons through collisions.