Cylindrical Liner Zpinches As Drivers For Converging Strong Shock Experiments

The thesis represents the development of an entirely new experimental platform for generating and studying converging radiative shock waves. It was discovered that the application of large magnetic pressures to gasfilled cylindrical metallic tubes could sequentially produce three shocks within the gas. A comprehensive set of instrumentation was devised to explore this system in detail and an exceptionally thorough experimental and theoretical study was carried out in order to understand the sou