Collisionless shocks in laboratory astrophysics experiments
Abstract
Influence of the plasma collisions on the laser-driven collisionless shock formation and subsequent ion acceleration is studied on the basis of two different collisional algorithms and their implementations in two well-known particle-in-cell codes EPOCH and SMILEI. In this setup, an ultra-intense incident laser pulse generates hot-electrons in a thick target, launching an electrostatic shock at the laser-plasma interface while also pushing the interface through the hole-boring effect. We observe, to varying degrees, the weakening of the space-charge effects due to collisions and improvements () in the energy spectra of quasi-monoenergetic ions in both PIC codes EPOCH and SMILEI. These results establish the `collisionlessness' of the collisionless shocks in laboratory astrophysics experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.03309,
title = {Collisionless shocks in laboratory astrophysics experiments},
author = {Shikha Bhadoria and Naveen Kumar and Christoph H. Keitel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.03309},
year = {2019}
}