Astrophysical explosions revisited: collisionless coupling of debris to magnetized plasma

Abstract

The coupling between a rapidly expanding cloud of ionized debris and an ambient magnetized plasma is revisited with a hybrid (kinetic ion/fluid electron) simulation code that allows a study over a wide range of plasma parameters. Over a specified range of hypothetical conditions, simple scaling laws in terms of the total debris mass and explosion speed are derived and verified for the maximal size of the debris cloud and the fraction of debris that free-streams from the burst along the magnetic field. The amount of debris that escapes from the burst with minimal coupling to the background magnetic field increases with the debris gyroradius. Test cases with two different debris species--including a heavy minority species with a relatively large gyroradius--highlight how the collisionless coupling of the debris depends on the single-particle trajectories as well as the overall conservation of energy and momentum.

arXiv commentTo appear in JGR: Space Physics

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Hybrid-VPIC: an Open-Source Kinetic/Fluid Hybrid Particle-in-Cell Code
• Hybrid Paricle-in-Cell Simulations of Electromagnetic Coupling and Waves From Streaming Burst Debris
• A conservative implicit-PIC scheme for the hybrid kinetic-ion fluid-electron plasma model on curvilinear meshes
• Strong collisionless coupling between an unmagnetized driver plasma and a magnetized background plasma
• On the anisotropic velocity distribution of newborn pickup ions in the heliosheath
• Hybrid simulations of the proton beam instabilities in the young solar wind. The formation of hammerhead-like distributions