Laboratory studies of energy partitioning in laser-driven, quasi-perpendicular collisionless shocks*

Collisionless shocks are ubiquitous objects in the universe. Many of these shocks are magnetized due to preexisting magnetic fields in the upstream, including shocks in the Earth’s magnetosphere and supernova remnants. Despite decades of observations and numerical simulations, there remains no clear understanding on how energy is partitioned between electrons and ions across a shock.

 

We present a novel experimental platform to study quasi-perpendicular magnetized collisionless shocks driven at the Omega laser facility at the University of Rochester. A plasma plume is launched by irradiating plastic (CH) targets with high-energy laser beams, creating a shock in a background hydrogen plasma premagnetized using inductive coils (B~10 T). Relevant plasma parameters (namely, velocity, temperature and density) are probed by optical Thomson Scattering. We investigate particle heating for a range of shock Mach numbers and compare to particle-in-cell simulations, and discuss the development of future experiments to probe anisotropic particle heating across magnetized collisionless shocks.