Design of Z-pinch based, jet-target collision experiments for laboratory astrophysics using 3D MHD modelling

摘要

The ablating plasma and precursor plasma flow obtained in conical wire array Z-pinches on the 1MA, 240ns rise-time MAGPIE facility provides a mechanism for generating radiatively cooled plasma jets with velocities of several hundred km/sec which can be sustained for several hundred nano-seconds. Such laboratory jets have been shown to provide a directly scalable representation of the radiatively cooled jets found in many young stellar objects during the post-launch phase where the jets are propagating through and interacting with the inter-stellar medium. Several features of the astrophysical jet-target interaction can be examined using such laboratory astrophysics experiments. These include the characteristic structure and emission of shocks launched into the background medium and the non-linear evolution of flow driven instabilities.