[IGPP Everyone] Plasma Science Seminar, Tues. 7/19 2pm, PAB 4-330. "New wine into old wineskins: collisionless shocks in plasmas" (Antoine Bret, U. Castilla La Mancha)

[Emmanuel V. Masongsong]

​​​​​Dear all, 

Dr. Antoine Bret (Universidad Castilla La Mancha) will be visiting us 
next week (Tuesday 7/19) and will give a talk at Plasma Science and 
Technology Institute Tuesday 7/19, 2pm, 4-330, see title and abstract 
below. Antoine is working on a wide range of theoretical Plasma 
Physics related topics with emphasis on Astrophysics (such as GRB, 
solar winds, cosmic rays etc) and inertial Confinement Fusion (such 
as fast ignition, beam plasma instabilities in the relativistic 
regime, collisionless shocks etc). Please let me know if you would 
like to meet with him. 


Best, 

Smadar (snaoz at astro.ucla.ecu) 
Department of Physics & Astronomy, UCLA 
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~snaoz/ 

TITLE: New wine into old wineskins: collisionless shocks in plasmas 

ABSTRACT: In 1808, Poisson realized that the conservation equations of 
a fluid through an interface offer 2 solutions: one continuous, when 
nothing changes, and another one, discontinuous, where there is a jump 
in density, velocity and pressure. Nearly 70 years later, Mach proved 
the second option was more than a mathematical curiosity, by providing 
the first picture of a shock wave moving through a fluid. Of course, 
the real world does not display any mathematical discontinuity. Since 
binary collisions are the only microscopic mechanisms capable of 
altering the fluid properties, the shock transition region in a fluid 
is a few mean-free-path thick. 

How is it then that the Earth bow shock in the solar wind has its 
front about 100 km thick, while the mean-free-path at the same 
location is about the Sun-Earth distance? It just happens that 
plasmas, that is, charged fluids, can sustain shock waves through 
purely collective electromagnetic means, even in the absence of binary 
collisions. The talk will review our current knowledge of these 
entities, focusing in particular on the way they can be formed, and 
their fulfillment of the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions. 

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