Observation of ultra-slow shock waves in a tunable magnetic lattice

Abstract

The combination of fast propagation speeds and highly localized nature has hindered the direct observation of the evolution of shock waves at the molecular scale. To address this limitation, an experimental system is designed by tuning a one-dimensional magnetic lattice to evolve benign wave forms into shock waves at observable spatial and temporal scales, thus serving as a 'magnifying glass' to illuminate shock processes. An accompanying analysis confirms that the formation of strong shocks is fully captured. The exhibited lack of a steady state induced by indefinite expansion of a disordered transition zone points to the absence of local thermodynamic equilibrium, and resurfaces lingering questions on the validity of continuum assumptions in presence of strong shocks.

References in corpus (1)

• Shear shock waves are observed in the brain

Cited by in corpus (4)

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• Hydrodynamics of a Discrete Conservation Law
• On the Whitham modulation equations for the Toda lattice and the quantitative characterization of its dispersive shocks
• Integrable Approximations of Dispersive Shock Waves of the Granular Chain