Collisionless shock formation, spontaneous electromagnetic fluctuations, and streaming instabilities
Collisionless shock formation, spontaneous electromagnetic fluctuations, and streaming instabilities
Collisionless shocks are ubiquitous in astrophysics and in the lab. Recent numerical simulations and experiments have shown how they can arise from the encounter of two collisionless plasma shells. When the shells interpenetrate, the overlapping region turns unstable, triggering the shock formation. As a first step towards a microscopic understanding …