Journal
NATURE PHYSICS
Volume 11, Issue 2, Pages 173-176Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS3178
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Funding
- US Department of Energy by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [DE-AC52-07NA27344]
- LLNL LDRD grant [11-ERD-054]
- European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), ERC grant [256973]
- ALCF [DE-AC02-06CH11357]
- LLNL Lawrence Fellowship
- DOE [DE-NA0002200]
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Collisionless shocks can be produced as a result of strong magnetic fields in a plasma flow, and therefore are common in many astrophysical systems. The Weibel instability is one candidate mechanism for the generation of sufficiently strong fields to create a collisionless shock. Despite their crucial role in astrophysical systems, observation of the magnetic fields produced by Weibel instabilities in experiments has been challenging. Using a proton probe to directly image electromagnetic fields, we present evidence of Weibel-generated magnetic fields that grow in opposing, initially unmagnetized plasma flows from laser-driven laboratory experiments. Three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations reveal that the instability efficiently extracts energy from the plasma flows, and that the self-generated magnetic energy reaches a few percent of the total energy in the system. This result demonstrates an experimental platform suitable for the investigation of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena, including collisionless shock formation in supernova remnants, large-scale magnetic field amplification, and the radiation signature from gamma-ray bursts.
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