Perpendicular subcritical shock structure in a collisional plasma experiment

Abstract

We present a study of perpendicular subcritical shocks in a collisional laboratory plasma. Shocks are produced by placing obstacles into the super-magnetosonic outflow from an inverse wire array z-pinch. We demonstrate the existence of subcritical shocks in this regime and find that secondary shocks form in the downstream. Detailed measurements of the subcritical shock structure confirm the absence of a hydrodynamic jump. We calculate the classical (Spitzer) resistive diffusion length and show that it is approximately equal to the shock width. We measure little heating across the shock (< 10 % of the ion kinetic energy) which is consistent with an absence of viscous dissipation.

6 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (4)

• The evolution of magnetic tower jets in the laboratory
• Simulating Magnetohydrodynamical Flow with Constrained Transport and Adaptive Mesh Refinement; Algorithms & Tests of the AstroBEAR Code
• Magnetized ICF Implosions: Scaling of Temperature and Yield Enhancement
• Two-Colour Interferometry and Thomson Scattering Measurements of a Plasma Gun

Cited by in corpus (3)

• The structure of 3D collisional magnetized bow shocks in pulsed-power-driven plasma flow
• Plasma flows during the ablation stage of an over-massed pulsed-power-driven exploding planar wire array
• Radiative cooling effects on reverse shocks formed by magnetised supersonic plasma flows