Strongly magnetized parallel collisionless shocks in pair plasmas

ORAL

Abstract

AB was supported by grants ENE2016-75703-R from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and SBPLY/17/180501/000264 from the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha. CH was supported by the FDSS NSF AGS-1936393 grant from the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii. DC was partially supported by NASA (grants 80NSSC18K1218, 80NSSC20K1273, and 80NSSC18K1726) and by NSF (grants AST-1714658, AST-2009326, AST-1909778, PHY-1748958, and PHY2010240).

*Collisionless shock waves are frequently treated/modeled as a collisional, fluid MHD discontinuity. In light of this, using PIC simulations of non-relativistic, parallel collisionless shocks, we detail the deviation of collisionless shocks form MHD predictions for varying magnetization/Alfvénic Mach numbers. We show that for sufficiently large upstream magnetic fields, the shock compression ratio is dramatically reduced, in agreement with the predictions of Bret & Narayan 2018. Additionally, we examine the role of field strength on the shock width and on the generation of energetic particles. This work reinforces a growing body of work that suggest that modeling many astrophysical systems with only a fluid plasma description omits potentially important physics.

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Publication: Kinetic Simulations of departure from MHD density jump in parallel collisionless shocks, Colby C. Haggerty, Antoine Bret, Damiano Caprioli, Submitted to MNRAS

Presenters

  • Antoine Bret

    • Univ de Castilla-La Mancha

Authors

  • Antoine Bret

    • Univ de Castilla-La Mancha

  • Colby C Haggerty

    • University of Hawaii

  • Damiano Caprioli

    • University of Chicago