Related papers: Cosmological shock waves
Collisionless plasma shocks are a common feature of many space and astrophysical systems and are sources of high-energy particles and non-thermal emission, channeling as much as 20\% of the shock's energy into non-thermal particles. The…
We review the possible roles of large scale shocks as particle accelerators in clusters of galaxies. Recent observational and theoretical work has suggested that high energy charged particles may constitute a substantial pressure component…
We investigate numerically the contribution to the cosmic gamma-ray background from cosmic-rays ions and electrons accelerated at intergalactic shocks associated with cosmological structure formation. We show that the kinetic energy of…
Magnetized collisionless shocks drive particle acceleration broadly in space and astrophysics. We perform the first large-scale particle-in-cell simulations with realistic laboratory parameters (density, temperature, and velocity) to…
Colliding collisionless shocks appear in a great variety of astrophysical phenomena and are thought to be possible sources of particle acceleration in the Universe. To investigate the detailed dynamics of this phenomenon, we have performed…
Galactic spiral shocks are dominant morphological features and believed to be responsible for substructure formation within spiral arms in disk galaxies. They can also contribute a substantial amount of kinetic energy to the interstellar…
Diffusive shock acceleration at collisionless shocks is thought to be the source of many of the energetic particles observed in space. Large-scale spatial variations of the magnetic field has been shown to be important in understanding…
When a magnetised, thermal plasma containing a shock wave efficiently accelerates Cosmic Rays (CR) a reaction is exerted on the fluid structure. The simplest description of this process involves three conservation equations for the…
Collisionless shock acceleration, which transfers localized particle energies to non-thermal energetic particles via electromagnetic potential, is ubiquitous in space plasma. We investigate dynamics of collisionless electrostatic shocks…
Collisionless shocks are fundamental processes that are ubiquitous in space plasma physics throughout the Heliosphere and most astrophysical environments. Earth's bow shock and interplanetary shocks at 1 AU offer the most readily accessible…
The localized deposition of the energy of a laser pulse, as it ablates a solid target, introduces high thermal pressure gradients in the plasma. The thermal expansion of this laser-heated plasma into the ambient medium (ionized residual…
When two plasmas collide, their interaction can be mediated by collisionless plasma instabilities or binary collisions between particles of each shell. By comparing the maximum growth rate of the collisionless instabilities with the…
One of the main features of astrophysical shocks is their ability to accelerate particles to extremely high energies. The leading acceleration mechanism, the diffusive shock acceleration is reviewed. It is demonstrated that its efficiency…
Shocks in relativistically hot plasmas are thought to exist in various high-energy astrophysical phenomena, but it is not clear how relativistic collisionless shocks are formed, whether particles are accelerated by the shock as in the case…
In this paper, the first in a series, we present a new theoretical model for the global structure and dissipation of relativistically magnetized collisionless shock waves. Quite remarkably, we find that in contrast to unmagnetized shocks,…
From the scale-free nature of gravity, the structure in the universe is expected to be self-similar on large scales. However, this self-similarity will eventually break down due to small-scale gas physics such as star formation, AGN and…
Relativistic collisionless shocks are associated with efficient particle acceleration when propagating into weakly magnetized homogeneous media; as the magnetization increases, particle acceleration becomes suppressed. We demonstrate that…
We develop a formalism for the identification and accurate estimation of the strength of structure formation shocks during cosmological smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations. Shocks not only play a decisive role for the thermalization…
A collisionless shock may be strongly modified by the presence of neutral atoms through the processes of charge exchange between ions and neutrals and ionization of the latter. These two processes lead to exchange of energy and momentum…
When supersonic plasma flows collide, many physical processes contribute to the morphology of the resulting shock. One of these processes is the acceleration of non-thermal ions, which will, eventually, reach relativistic speeds and become…