Analyzing Shadowgraphs of Magnetized Collisionless Shocks

Magnetized collisionless shocks are a fundamental and ubiquitous process in systems with fast magnetized flows. Despite decades of spacecraft and remote sensing observations, key questions remain about how shock structure evolves and how particles are heated across shocks. Recent experiments [1-2] have demonstrated the ability to create magnetized collisionless shocks in the laboratory, but the system sizes were too small to address these questions. A new experimental platform, MagShockZ, has been developed to study magnetized collisionless shocks over large system sizes on the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories. A primary diagnostic for these experiments is shadowgraphy to characterize the shock density profile. We present results on methods of analyzing electron density profiles from shadowgraphs of magnetized shocks using both synthetic and experimental data. Using synthetic shadowgraphs obtained from an initially defined electron density [3], we were able to validate our methodology by recreating the electron density using the synthetic data. We then applied these techniques to experimental shadowgraphs, obtained from experiments on the OMEGA EP laser facility to reconstruct the electron density profile of a laboratory shock. These results will be applied to upcoming MagShockZ experiments on the Z Machine.