Kinetic simulations of magnetized collisionless shock experiments on the Z Machine

Magnetized collisionless shocks are formed when a super-magnetosonic flow encounters a magnetic obstacle, and the resulting shockwave forms on length scales much shorter than the particle mean free path. Recent laboratory experiments have demonstrated the ability to drive magnetized collisionless shocks [1-2], but the exact mechanisms of particle heating and non-stationary shock behavior remain open questions due to the limited domain sizes of previous experiments. A new experimental platform, MagShockZ, has been developed to study high-Mach-number magnetized collisonless shocks over large domains on the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories by combining a pulsed-power-driven exploding wire array and a laser-driven magnetic piston. We present results from quasi-1D and 2D simulations that modeled the experiments using the particle-in-cell (PIC) code OSIRIS and radiative MHD code FLASH. The initial conditions for the PIC simulations were extracted from FLASH simulations of the laser-target interaction. The resulting shock formation and propagation were then modeled with OSIRIS. We use synthetic diagnostics to compare the OSIRIS results directly to experimental results.