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Kinetic inhibition of magnetohydrodynamics shocks in the vicinity of a parallel magnetic field

Part of: Frontiers in Plasma Physics Conference Focus on Plasma Astrophysics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2017

Antoine Bret ,
Asaf Pe’er ,
Lorenzo Sironi ,
Aleksander Sa̧dowski  and
Ramesh Narayan
Antoine Bret*
Affiliation:
ETSI Industriales, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 13071 Ciudad Real, Spain Instituto de Investigaciones Energéticas y Aplicaciones Industriales, Campus Universitario de Ciudad Real, 13071 Ciudad Real, Spain Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, MA 02138, USA
Asaf Pe’er
Affiliation:
Physics Department, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
Lorenzo Sironi
Affiliation:
Department of Astronomy, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
Aleksander Sa̧dowski
Affiliation:
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Einstein Fellow
Ramesh Narayan
Affiliation:
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, MA 02138, USA
*
†Email address for correspondence: [email protected]
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Abstract

According to magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), the encounter of two collisional magnetized plasmas at high velocity gives rise to shock waves. Investigations conducted so far have found that the same conclusion still holds in the case of collisionless plasmas. For the case of a flow-aligned field, MHD stipulates that the field and the fluid are disconnected, so that the shock produced is independent of the field. We present a violation of this MHD prediction when considering the encounter of two cold pair plasmas along a flow-aligned magnetic field. As the guiding magnetic field grows, isotropization is progressively suppressed, resulting in a strong influence of the field on the resulting structure. A micro-physics analysis allows us to understand the mechanisms at work. Particle-in-cell simulations also support our conclusions and show that the results are not restricted to a strictly parallel field.

Keywords

magnetized plasmasplasma flows
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Plasma Physics , Volume 83 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , 715830201
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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