Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
May 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008aas...212.0342m&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #212, #3.42; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.192
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Astrophysical phenomena, such as jets from active galactic nuclei and quasars, supernova explosions and their remnants, accretion flows onto black holes and neutron stars, or gas in galaxy clusters, are conventionally thought to be impossible to reproduce in laboratory experiments without appropriate scaling, due to tremendous difference between the astrophysical spatial and temporal scales and the laboratory ones. Such scalings are unavoidably used in Laboratory Astrophysics and are sometimes blamed for inadequacy of experimental conditions to the modeled astrophysical phenomena. It turns out that there is a remarkable exception, however. Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) -- the most extreme explosions in the universe -- are thought to drive relativistic shocks waves, which produce the observed radiation. As was first theoretically predicted and further confirmed with particle-in-cell simulations, these shock waves are mediated by a kinetic plasma instability - the Weibel instability - that sets the on very small and short scales (the plasma skin-depth and the inverse plasma frequency, respectively) that can be directly tested at presently operating laser-plasma experiments. In our presentation we will argue that this is especially true for the early phases - the prompt and early afterglow - of a GRB evolution, when the electron cooling takes only few tens of plasma times and the skin-depth is only a factor of a hundred or so lower than it is in typical experiments utilizing Petawatt-scale lasers. These conditions are so close that there is essentially no need to perform any scaling at all in order to experimentally study the relevant GRB physics, thus providing a unique opportunity for bridging Astrophysics and Laboratory Physics.
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