Title: Interaction of collisionless shocks and pre-existing plasma turbulence in hybrid simulations
Speaker: Laura Vuorinen (QMUL)
Abstract: Collisionless shocks and plasma turbulence play key roles in particle acceleration and energy dissipation in space plasmas. Shock waves within the heliosphere, such as planetary bow shocks and interplanetary shocks, interact with the inherently turbulent solar wind. However, historically this pre-existing turbulence has been largely neglected in plasma simulations of collisionless shocks. We present a novel modelling setup in which we generate turbulent fields in MHD simulations and dynamically input them into hybrid shock simulations, enabling us to investigate the prolonged interaction between MHD- to ion-scale plasma turbulence and a shock wave. We report results on the interaction of turbulence and a perpendicular shock: how the pre-existing upstream turbulence modulates the shock front, how the turbulence evolves across the shock, and how it influences plasma stability against ion kinetic instabilities in the downstream region.