Shock-Clump Interaction Studies in the Laboratory

Large-scale directional outflows of supersonic plasma are driven by a wide variety of objects in the universe. Typical models of the outflows assume simplistic geometries; however, images of most outflows show a much more complex structure that consists of multiple clumps and shocks. To bridge the gap between the complex system in space and the simplified models, controlled scaled experiments were performed to elucidate the physics of a shock progressing through a clumpy medium. This talk will present experiments on the Omega Laser in which a shock impacts density discontinuities in order to understand the perturbed shock structure. Two types of discontinuities that had the same average density were tested: one with a uniformly distributed dopant and another with $\sim$47 randomly distributed high-density clumps. We have obtained high-resolution radiographs that detail the temporal evolution of the shock and density discontinuity.