Happy Birthday Willard Bennett

[MGmirkin]

(Happy Birthday Willard Bennett; Jun 13, 2008)

Willard Harrison Bennett, a notable scientist and inventor and for whom the Bennett pinch, or “z-pinch,” is named, was born June 13, 1903.

As a jet of water flows, the surface tension causes the stream to constrict, and the jet forms beads or droplets. One sometimes sees this in a stream of water from a garden hose.

In 1992, Chief Researcher at the Kurchatov Institute, Boris Trubnikov, noted that water beading is a good analogy for the observed pinching of plasma jets in the laboratory as well as the pinching of cosmic plasma in nebulae. In plasma, the pinching is due to the self-generated magnetic field compressing the jet unevenly along its length. The pinch is sometimes called a z-pinch because the magnetic field lies along the z-axis and the beading is sometimes referred to as a sausage instability because of its shape.

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