Abstract:
Collisional plasma shocks generated from supersonic flows are an important feature in
many astrophysical and laboratory high-energy-density plasmas. Compared to single-ionspecies
plasma shocks, plasma shock fronts with multiple ion species contain additional
structure, including interspecies ion separation driven by gradients in species concentration,
temperature, pressure, and electric potential. In this talk, I will present time-resolved
density and temperature measurements of two ion species in collisional plasma shocks
produced by head-on merging of supersonic plasma jets, allowing determination of the ion
diffusion coefficients. My results provide the first experimental validation of the
fundamental inter-ion-species transport theory. The temperature separation, a higher-order
effect demonstrated in the experiment, provides new data valuable for advancements in
modeling high-energy-density and inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments.