Magnetized Collisionless Shocks on the Z Machine: First Results

Magnetized collisionless shocks are ubiquitous in heliospheric and astrophysical environments, including planetary shocks, the heliopause, supernova remnants, and galaxy clusters. Of particular interest are particle heating and non-stationary dynamics in quasi-perpendicular shocks. However, we currently lack an understanding of key aspects of how these processes operate, with multiple competing theories and incomplete hints from satellite observations of shocks in space. Recent advances have enabled collisionless shocks to be created experimentally using high-powered lasers [1,2], but the system sizes were too small to address these questions. We present a new experimental platform, MagShockZ, on the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories that combines a large magnetized volume generated by an exploding wire array with a strongly driven plasma flow using the Z Beamlet laser to drive a high-Mach-number collisionless shock. Details on the experimental platform, results from the first experiments, and comparisons to MHD and particle-in-cell numerical simulations will be discussed.