To understand in detail what happens with an imploding wire array would require one to account for many different processes beginning with the wire explosion and ending with the Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities. Haines (1998) has performed a heuristic analysis of the multiwire array implosion and suggested that the dynamics and behavior of the wire array pinch be divided into four distinct phases. These phases are as follows: the electrical explosion of an individual wire (Phase 1), merging of the wire plasmas and the current shell formation (Phase 2), running-in of the wire array (Phase 3), and the stagnation of the pinch at the axis (Phase 4).