FLASH Hydrodynamic 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 are conducting experiments to investigate the generation of magnetic fields by asymmetric shocks. These experiments involve laser illumination of a foil target, driving a shock into a gas-filled chamber, and a variety of plasma and magnetic field diagnostics. Hydrodynamic-only simulations are useful because the shock-generated magnetic fields are not dynamically important. In this paper, we describe hydrodynamic simulations of the experiment conducted using the FLASH code. The scientific objective of these simulations is to explore the sensitivity of the properties of the jet-like shock to target composition, thickness, and lateral extent.

*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.

Authors

  • Anthony Scopatz

    • The University of Chicago

  • Milad Fatenejad

    • The University of Chicago

  • Norbert Flocke

    • The University of Chicago

  • Gianluca Gregori

    • The University of Oxford

  • Don Lamb

    • The University of Chicago

  • Dongwook Lee

    • The University of Chicago

  • Jena Meineke

    • The University of Oxford

  • Petros Tzeferacos

    • The University of Chicago

  • Klaus Weide

    • The University of Chicago