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Published Online: 06 February 2017
Accepted: January 2017

Formation of collisionless shocks in magnetized plasma interaction with kinetic-scale obstacles

Physics of Plasmas 24, 022901 (2017); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4975310
F. Cruz1,a), E. P. Alves1,2, R. A. Bamford3, R. Bingham3,4, R. A. Fonseca1,5, and L. O. Silva1,b)
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Abstract
We investigate the formation of collisionless magnetized shocks triggered by the interaction between magnetized plasma flows and miniature-sized (order of plasma kinetic-scales) magnetic obstacles resorting to massively parallel, full particle-in-cell simulations, including the electron kinetics. The critical obstacle size to generate a compressed plasma region ahead of these objects is determined by independently varying the magnitude of the dipolar magnetic moment and the plasma magnetization. We find that the effective size of the obstacle depends on the relative orientation between the dipolar and plasma internal magnetic fields, and we show that this may be critical to form a shock in small-scale structures. We study the microphysics of the magnetopause in different magnetic field configurations in 2D and compare the results with full 3D simulations. Finally, we evaluate the parameter range where such miniature magnetized shocks can be explored in laboratory experiments.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the European Research Council (InPairs ERC-2015-AdG 695088) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation through the 2016 Scientific Research Stimulus Program. Simulations were performed at the ACCELERATES cluster (Lisbon, Portugal).

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