Turbulent stagnation in a Z-pinch plasma.

The ion kinetic energy in a stagnating plasma was previously determined by Kroupp et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 105001 (2011)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.107.105001] from Doppler-dominated line shapes 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 nonuniform density distribution. We demonstrate how to reanalyze the spectroscopic data consistent with the turbulent picture and show that this leads to better concordance of the overconstrained spectroscopic measurements, while also substantially lowering the inferred mean density.