Evaluating a Collisionless Shock Experiment on the Z Machine Using FLASH

Collisionless shocks are common in many astrophysical systems from planetary magnetospheres to supernovae remnants. While we have numerous in-situ satellite and telescopic measurements, some questions can best be explored in a controlled laboratory setting. Experiments at the Omega Laser Facility (Shaeffer et al., 2017, 2019) demonstrated the creation of a high-Mach-number collisionless shock but were limited to a small, magnetized volume. The Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories can produce a large, magnetized background plasma from an exploding wire array. Z-Beamlet’s high-powered laser irradiates a target, driving a high magnetosonic Mach piston into the background plasma. This allows previous experiments to be extended to larger magnetized volumes, enabling collisionless shocks to evolve over longer time and length scales and undergo processes like shock reformation. Previous FLASH simulations explored the laser interaction with the ambient plasma and the target. These results are used to initialize PIC simulations (Schneidinger et al., 2024). This work compares magnetized FLASH results to the dynamics of a piston expanding into a large, magnetized volume.