Perpendicular subcritical shock structure in a collisional plasma experiment
Plasma Physics
2022-12-07 v1
Abstract
We present a study of perpendicular subcritical shocks in a collisional laboratory plasma. Shocks are produced by placing obstacles into the super-magnetosonic outflow from an inverse wire array z-pinch. We demonstrate the existence of subcritical shocks in this regime and find that secondary shocks form in the downstream. Detailed measurements of the subcritical shock structure confirm the absence of a hydrodynamic jump. We calculate the classical (Spitzer) resistive diffusion length and show that it is approximately equal to the shock width. We measure little heating across the shock (< 10 % of the ion kinetic energy) which is consistent with an absence of viscous dissipation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2201.09039,
title = {Perpendicular subcritical shock structure in a collisional plasma experiment},
author = {D. R. Russell and G. C. Burdiak and J. J. Carroll-Nellenback and J. W. D. Halliday and J. D. Hare and S. Merlini and L. G. Suttle and V. Valenzuela-Villaseca and S. J. Eardley and J. A. Fullalove and G. C. Rowland and R. A. Smith and A. Frank and P. Hartigan and A. L. Velikovich and S. V. Lebedev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.09039},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
6 pages, 5 figures