Magnetized collisionless shock experiments and simulations for the Omega Laser Facility

Collisionless shocks are commonly observed in a variety of astrophysical phenomena such as supernova remnants and the Earth’s magnetosphere. Laboratory experiments are an important tool for studying magnetized collisionless shocks as they are highly controlled, reproducible, and allow for more robust sampling compared to in situ spacecraft measurements. To analyze the fundamental nature of these shocks, Schaeffer et al. (2019) created magnetized collisionless shocks in an experimental campaign at the Omega Laser Facility. The experiment measured the flow velocity of an expanding supersonic piston plasma within an ambient magnetized plasma. In this presentation, we further this study by reproducing this experiment using FLASH, a radiation magneto-hydrodynamic code available through the University of Rochester. We will compare the FLASH simulation results with experimental results in magnetized and unmagnetized environments. Specifically, we will compare the simulated piston speed, electron density, and electron temperature to the experimentally derived results from Schaeffer et al.

This work is funded by the NNSA Center of Excellence under cooperative agreement number DE-NA0004146. The software used in this work was developed in part by the DOE NNSA- and DOE Office of Science-supported Flash Center for Computational Science at the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester. This work was supported by the NSF through grant PHY-1935950.