Plasma instabilities and Ultrafast collisional ion heating by Electrostatic shocks

chintalwad, Sachin and Bhuvanesh, Ramakrishna (2018) Plasma instabilities and Ultrafast collisional ion heating by Electrostatic shocks. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad.

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Abstract

High-intensity lasers can be used to generate shockwaves, which have found applications in nuclear fusion, proton imaging, cancer therapies and materials science. Collision less electrostatic shocks are one type of shockwave widely studied for applications involving ion acceleration. Here we show a novel mechanism for collision less electrostatic shocks to heat small amounts of solid density matter to temperatures of ∼keV in tens of femto-seconds. Unusually, electrons play no direct role in the heating and it is the ions that determine the heating rate. Ions are heated due to an interplay between the electric field of the shock, the local density increase during the passage of the shock and collisions between different species of ion. In simulations, these factors combine to produce rapid, localized heating of the lighter ion species. Although the heated volume is modest, this would be one of the fastest heating mechanisms discovered if demonstrated in the laboratory.

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