期刊
NATURE PHYSICS
卷 11, 期 2, 页码 173-176出版社
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS3178
关键词
-
资金
- 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]
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.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据