A laser-driven experimental platform to study angular momentum transport in disk-jet transitions

We present the design of an experimental platform to produce supersonic, rotating plasmas on the OMEGA laser looking at studying astrophysical processes characteristic of accretion disks and jet launching. A rotating plasma is driven by the oblique collision of 6 simultaneous radially inward plasma outflows produced by laser irradiation of V-shaped targets made of CH, assembled in a circular array with an outer diameter of ∽15 mm. Each V-shaped target has an opening angle of 60^○ and an offset angle of 5^○. Axial pressure gradients lead to the formation of bipolar rotating jets normal to the plane of rotation. The rotation velocity will be measured using optical Thomson scattering and the plasma dynamics will be measured with time-resolved, self-emission X-ray imaging. We also present the expected plasma conditions in the experiments with numerical simulations with the 3-D MHD code Gorgon.