Home > Facilities > COBRA

at Cornell University

About the Facility

3-4 Pulses Per Day
Large suite of diagnostics
On-site machine fabrication support
Staff Scientist, technician and Grad Student support

134 Rhodes Drive,
Ithaca, NY 14850

COBRA is designed to drive ~ 10 nH loads at 1 MA with 95-230 ns zero-to-peak pulses. COBRA has been used for a variety of HED experiments using conical wire arrays, laboratory plasma jets, magnetic reconnection geometries, X-pinches and gas-puff, wire array and liner Z-pinches. Staffing includes one machinist, two technicians, a research support specialist with a strong optics background, a postdoc, graduate students and three faculty, all familiar with the COBRA operation.

Diagnostic Summary

  • A 10 J, 3ns laser on green or IR for Thomson scattering, Faraday rotation or soft x-ray pulse generation
  • A 150 ps laser interferometer split into 3 pulses for schlieren or Mach-Zehnder interferometry.
  • A visible light streak camera
  • Two X-ray streak cameras
  • Two 750 mm spectrometers and two 300mm spectrometers
  • Two gated spectrometer cameras
  • A twelve-frame visible-UV camera
  • Two IR cameras
  • Two XUV, gated MCP quadrant cameras
  • Zeeman splitting diagnostic for magnetic field measurements
  • Several PCD’s and XRD’s for time resolved X-ray detection (one calibrated)
  • X-ray, time integrated pinhole cameras

Call for Proposals

Now accepting proposals for research projects at our facilities. Your proposals will be reviewed by our team and grants awarded to researchers who meet criteria.

Submit a Proposal
person working with high voltage