High-power laser experiment forming a supercritical collisionless shock in a magnetized uniform plasma at rest
Abstract
We present a new experimental method to generate quasi-perpendicular supercritical magnetized collisionless shocks. In our experiment, ambient nitrogen (N) plasma is at rest and well-magnetized, and it has uniform mass density. The plasma is pushed by laser-driven ablation aluminum (Al) plasma. Streaked optical pyrometry and spatially resolved laser collective Thomson scattering clarify structures of plasma density and temperatures, which are compared with one-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations. It is indicated that just after the laser irradiation, the Al plasma is magnetized by a self-generated Biermann battery field, and the plasma slaps the incident N plasma. The compressed external field in the N plasma reflects N ions, leading to counter-streaming magnetized N flows. Namely we identify the edge of the reflected N ions. Such interacting plasmas form a magnetized collisionless shock.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2201.07976,
title = {High-power laser experiment forming a supercritical collisionless shock in a magnetized uniform plasma at rest},
author = {Ryo Yamazaki and S. Matsukiyo and T. Morita and S. J. Tanaka and T. Umeda and K. Aihara and M. Edamoto and S. Egashira and R. Hatsuyama and T. Higuchi and T. Hihara and Y. Horie and M. Hoshino and A. Ishii and N. Ishizaka and Y. Itadani and T. Izumi and S. Kambayashi and S. Kakuchi and N. Katsuki and R. Kawamura and Y. Kawamura and S. Kisaka and T. Kojima and A. Konuma and R. Kumar and T. Minami and I. Miyata and T. Moritaka and Y. Murakami and K. Nagashima and Y. Nakagawa and T. Nishimoto and Y. Nishioka and Y. Ohira and N. Ohnishi and M. Ota and N. Ozaki and T. Sano and K. Sakai and S. Sei and J. Shiota and Y. Shoji and K. Sugiyama and D. Suzuki and M. Takagi and H. Toda and S. Tomita and S. Tomiya and H. Yoneda and T. Takezaki and K. Tomita and Y. Kuramitsu and Y. Sakawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.07976},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
17 pages, 12 figures, 1 table. Physical Review E, in press