Laboratory Astrophysics and Collimated Stellar Outflows: The Production of Radiatively Cooled Hypersonic Plasma Jets

By S. Lebedev, J. Chittenden, F. Beg, S. Bland, Andrea Ciardi, D. Ampleford, S. Hughes, M. Haines, A. Frank, Eric G. Blackman and 1 more. 2001

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the first results of astrophysically relevant experiments where highly supersonic plasma jets are generated via conically convergent flows. The convergent flows are created by electrodynamic acceleration of plasma in a conical array of fine metallic wires (a modification of the wire array Z-pinch). Stagnation of plasma flow on the axis of symmetry forms a standing conical shock effectively collimating the flow in the axial direction. This scenario is essentially similar to that discussed by Cantó and collaborators as a purely hydrodynamic mechanism for jet formation in astrophysical systems. Experiments using different materials (Al, Fe, and W) show that a highly supersonic (M ~ 20), well-collimated jet is generated when the radiative cooling rate of the plasma is significant. We discuss scaling issues for the experiments and their potential use for numerical code verification. The experiments also may allow direct exploration of astrophysically relevant issues such as collimation, stability, and jet-cloud interactions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d01591dfbd4db93cc9b59f3fc026eb20bb9588b

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Citations in the corpus

Magnetic tower outflows from a radial wire array Z-pinch (2005, methodology): “The formation of this axial plasma column is in fact similar to the formation of standing conical shocks seen in jet experiments using conical wire arrays (Lebedev et al 2002).”
Experimental astrophysics with high power lasers and Z pinches (2004, methodology): “27 b Lebedev et al., 2002 .”