Construction of the Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX)*

The Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX) will investigate the behavior and interaction of spherically convergent plasma jets in forming imploding spherical plasma liners for HED and MIF-relevant studies. Numerous hardware systems have been assembled for the new PLX facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory to prepare for first plasma. A three meter diameter spherical vacuum tank is coupled to an oil-free vacuum pump system reaching sub-$10^{-6}$~torr pressures on the first pump-down. A modular, distributed, and portable 60~kV pulsed-power system has been constructed for initial experiments on single jet propagation and two jet merging, with each plasma gun source having 70~kJ of stored energy. In addition, a capacitor test stand has been constructed in order to test each of the 180 required capacitors to the expected operational voltage. Finally, the experiment will be controlled via FPGA/LabView to interact with numerous custom-built pieces of electronics for interlock, control, triggering, and data acquisition.