Heidelberg 2015 – scientific programme

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 10: Poster: Interaction with strong or short laser pulses

A 10.3: Poster

Monday, March 23, 2015, 17:00–19:00, C/Foyer

Collisionless shocks in laboratory plasmas — •Shikha Bhadoria, Naveen Kumar, and Christoph H. Keitel — Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik, Saupfercheckweg 1, 69117, Heidelberg, Germany

Collisionless shocks are formed when two counter-propagating streams of plasmas are collided. This situation occurs quite often in astrophysical settings e.g when the supernova remnant blast shell hits the interstellar medium etc. In a laboratory this could be easily envisaged by irradiating two energetic laser pulses on thin-foil targets placed opposite to each other. These collisionless shocks are responsible for extreme acceleration of charged particles (e.g. cosmic rays) by Fermi acceleration mechanism, however little is known about their formation process. We present results of collisionless shock formation in a laboratory and discuss their implications for the astrophysical scenario.