Formation of collisionless shocks in magnetized plasma interaction with kinetic-scale obstacles

Abstract

We investigate the formation of collisionless magnetized shocks triggered by the interaction between magnetized plasma flows and miniature-sized (order of plasma kinetic-scales) magnetic obstacles resorting to massively parallel, full particle-in-cell simulations, including the electron kinetics. The critical obstacle size to generate a compressed plasma region ahead of these objects is determined by independently varying the magnitude of the dipolar magnetic moment and the plasma magnetization. We find that the effective size of the obstacle depends on the relative orientation between the dipolar and plasma internal magnetic fields, and we show that this may be critical to form a shock in small-scale structures. We study the microphysics of the magnetopause in different magnetic field configurations in 2D and compare the results with full 3D simulations. Finally, we evaluate the parameter range where such miniature magnetized shocks can be explored in laboratory experiments.

References in corpus (5)

• Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains
• An exploration of the effectiveness of artificial mini-magnetospheres as a potential Solar Storm shelter for long term human space missions
• Hybrid simulations of mini-magnetospheres in the laboratory
• Laboratory simulation of field aligned currents in experiment on laser-produced plasma interacting with magnetic dipole
• SEP acceleration in CME driven shocks using a hybrid code

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Laser-Driven, Ion-Scale Magnetospheres in Laboratory Plasmas. I. Experimental Platform and First Results
• Laser-Driven, Ion-Scale Magnetospheres in Laboratory Plasmas. II. Particle-in-cell Simulations
• Laboratory study of magnetic reconnection in lunar-relevant mini-magnetospheres