# Turbulent stagnation in a z-pinch plasma

## TL;DR

This paper proposes a new turbulent model for z-pinch plasma stagnation, re-analyzing spectroscopic data to better match observations and revise plasma density estimates.

## Contribution

It introduces a turbulence-based framework for plasma stagnation analysis, improving data consistency and density estimations over previous uniform models.

## Key findings

- Re-analysis aligns spectroscopic data with turbulence model
- Revised density estimates are substantially lower
- Enhanced understanding of plasma behavior during stagnation

## Abstract

The ion kinetic energy in a stagnating plasma was previously determined by Kroupp et al. (Kroupp et al., 2011), from Doppler-dominated lineshapes augmented by measurements of plasma properties and assuming a uniform-plasma model. Notably, the energy was found to be dominantly stored in hydrodynamic flow. Here, we advance a new description of this stagnation as supersonically turbulent. Such turbulence implies a non-uniform density distribution. We demonstrate how to re-analyze the spectroscopic data consistent with the turbulent picture, and show this leads to better concordance of the overconstrained spectroscopic measurements, while also substantially lowering the inferred mean density.