Related papers: Formation of foreshock transients and associated s…
Several types of foreshock transients upstream of Earth's bow shock possessing a tenuous, hot core have been observed and simulated. Because of the low dynamic pressure in their cores, these phenomena can significantly disturb the bow shock…
Foreshock transients are ion kinetic structures in the ion foreshock. Due to their dynamic pressure perturbations, they can disturb the bow shock and magnetosphere-ionosphere system. They can also accelerate particles contributing to shock…
We characterize the nature of magnetic structures in the foreshock region of Mars associated with discontinuities in the solar wind. The structures form at the upstream edge of moving foreshocks caused by slow rotations in the…
We use the multi-spacecraft capabilities of the Cluster and THEMIS missions to show that two types of foreshock may be detected in spacecraft data. One is the global foreshock that appears upstream of the Earth's quasi-parallel bow-shock…
Thermal electrons have gyroradii many orders of magnitude smaller than the finite width of a shock, thus need to be pre-accelerated before they can cross it and be accelerated by diffusive shock acceleration. One region where…
Collisionless shocks in space and astrophysical plasmas mediate energy exchange between charged particles and fields in two or more plasma flows. In this study we analyze the evolution of ion distributions around a reformation cycle of a…
The collision of two plasma clouds at a speed that exceeds the ion acoustic speed can result in the formation of shocks. This phenomenon is observed not only in astrophysical scenarios such as the propagation of supernova remnant (SNR)…
Slow-mode shocks are important in understanding fast magnetic reconnection, jet formation and heating in the solar atmosphere, and other astrophysical systems. The atmospheric conditions in the solar chromosphere allow both ionised and…
To undergo diffusive shock acceleration, electrons need to be pre-accelerated to increase their energies by several orders of magnitude, else their gyro-radii are smaller than the finite width of the shock. In oblique shocks, where the…
Foreshock transients upstream of Earth's bow shock have been recently observed to accelerate electrons to many times their thermal energy. How such acceleration occurs is unknown, however. Using THEMIS case studies, we examine a subset of…
Electron heating/acceleration in the foreshock, by which electrons may be energized beyond thermal energies prior to encountering the bow shock, is very important for the bow shock dynamics. And then these electrons would be more easily…
Collisionless shocks tend to send charged particles into the upstream, driving electric currents through the plasma. Using kinetic particle-in-cell simulations, we investigate how the background thermal plasma neutralizes such currents in…
We analyze the properties of steady and time-dependent C shocks under conditions prevailing in giant molecular clouds. For steady C shocks, we show that ionization equilibrium holds and use numerical integrations to obtain the shock…
Nonrelativistic electrostatic unmagnetized shocks are frequently observed in laboratory plasmas and they are likely to exist in astrophysical plasmas. Their maximum speed, expressed in units of the ion acoustic speed far upstream of the…
Shocks in astrophysical transients are key sites of particle acceleration. If the shock upstream is optically thick, radiation smoothens the velocity discontinuity at the shock (radiation-mediated shocks). However, in mildly magnetized…
Collisionless shocks are common in astrophysical systems and stand as sites of particle acceleration. While particles at perpendicular shocks may not return to the upstream region, at oblique shocks a fraction of energetic electrons manage…
A shock wave propagating perpendicularly to an ambient magnetic field accelerates particles considerably faster than in the parallel propagation regime. However, the perpendicular acceleration stops after the shock overruns a circular…
Thermalization and heating of plasma flows at shocks result in unstable charged-particle distributions which generate a wide range of electromagnetic waves. These waves, in turn, can further accelerate and scatter energetic particles. Thus,…
Foreshock disturbances -- large-scale (~1000 km to >30,000 km), transient (~5-10 per day - lasting ~10s of seconds to several minutes) structures [1,2] - generated by suprathermal (>100 eV to 100s of keV) ions [3,4] arise upstream of…
In models of fast magnetic reconnection, flux transfer occurs within a small portion of a current sheet triggering stored magnetic energy to be thermalized by shocks. When the initial current sheet separates magnetic fields which are not…