Analysis of a Magnetized Collisionless Shock Experiment on Z-Machine Using FLASH

Magnetized collisionless shocks are crucial to numerous astrophysical systems, including planetary magnetospheres and supernova remnants. While there are in-situ satellite and telescopic measurements, a controlled laboratory setting can provide important insights. Previous 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. This experiment used the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories to produce a large volume of magnetized plasma utilizing an exploding wire array. Z-Beamlet’s high-powered laser then strikes a target, driving a high magnetosonic Mach piston. The resulting collisionless shocks are observed over long time and length scales. This study uses the FLASH code to analyze several interesting features seen in the experiments. We will also demonstrate synthetic measurements which we can compare to experimental results.

This work is funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy 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 U. Chicago and the U. Rochester.

This work was supported by the NSF, USA through grant PHY-1935950.

Computational resources and services provided by Advanced Research Computing at the U. Michigan, USA.