FLASH Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Experiments to Explore the Generation of Cosmological Magnetic Fields
POSTER
Abstract
Magnetic fields are ubiquitous throughout the universe. However, the origin and strength of these fields are not fully understood. A promising mechanism for the origin of seed fields is the asymmetric shocks that occur in hierarchical structure formation when smaller halos merge to form galaxies and galaxies merge to form clusters of galaxies. The seed fields are generated by the Biermann battery mechanism. The COSMOLAB team of the University of Oxford is conducting experiments to investigate the generation of magnetic fields by asymmetric shocks. These experiments involve the laser illumination of a foil target, driving a shock into a gas-filled chamber, and a variety of plasma and magnetic field diagnostics. In this paper, we describe magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the experiment carried out using the FLASH code. The scientific objective of these simulations is to explore the morphology and strength of the magnetic fields generated by ablation of target material by the laser, and by the jet-like shock that is produced on the opposite side of the target.
*This work was supported in part at U. Chicago by DOE NNSA ASC through the Argonne Institute for Computing in Science under field work proposal 57789; and NSF grant PHY-0903997.