Physics of Collisionless Shocks

The present book provides a contemporary systematic treatment of shock waves in high-temperature collisionless plasmas as are encountered in near Earth space and in Astrophysics. It consists of two parts. Part I develops the complete theory of shocks in dilute hot plasmas under the assumption of absence of collisions among the charged particles  when the interaction is mediated solely by the self-consistent electromagnetic fields. Such shocks are naturally magnetised implying that the magnetic field plays an important role in their evolution and dynamics. This part treats subcritical shocks which dissipate flow energy by generating anomalous resistance or viscosity. The main emphasis is, however, on super-critical shocks where the anomalous dissipation is insufficient to retard the upstream flow. These shocks, depending on the direction of the upstream magnetic field, are distinguished as quasi-perpendicular and quasi-parallel shocks which exhibit different behaviours, reflecting particles back upstream and generating high electromagnetic wave intensities. Particle acceleration and turbulence at such shocks become possible and important. Part II treats planetary bow shocks and the famous Heliospheric Termination shock as examples of two applications of the theory developed in part I.

André Balogh is Emeritus Professor of Space Physics in Imperial College London and a past Director of the International Space Science Institute, Bern, Switzerland. He has participated in numerous scientific space missions since the mid-1960s and has been a Principal Investigator on the Ulysses and Cluster missions. His principal research interest is the observation and study of magnetic fields in the heliosphere and in planetary environments. He is author and co-author of over 450 scientific publications and editor of seven books on solar system topics.
Rudolf Treumann is retired faculty from the Department of Geophysics and Environmental Sciences, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Munich, Germany. He has published widely on plasma physics and astrophysical topics. He is an author of a two-volume textbook on space plasma physics and coeditor of several books on fundamental physics and astrophysics.