The vapor phase separating the initial solid state from the final plasma state of wire loads in pulse power devices is often assumed to be very short lived and of no consequence to the subsequent load implosion for fast current pulses. However, researchers have attributed Cu K&agr;radiation and load stability to a persistent solid core in experiments with Cu wires or frozen D2fibers, respectively. The spatial structure of Al Z‐Pinch loads has been studied with streaked absorptiongrams, holographic interferometry, gated multiple pinhole cameras, and debris collectors to address this issue. A coronal plasma surrounding a neutral rich inner region is seen 310 ns into a current pulse having a quarter period of 1.5 &mgr;s. The observations made of the coronal plasma separating from the neutral inner region in two wire experiments has ramifications for multiple wire arrays. This phenomenon may account for pre‐cursor plasma formation, softened implosion, a small fraction of the mass radiating in the K shell and straggling in the load assembly on the axis. The results indicate that the initial plasma formation process on individual wires of an array is very important to the subsequent load implosion and must be modeled realistically.