The thickness of perpendicular collisionless shocks in a hot plasma

Abstract

By linearizing about the upstream state, the characteristic length for the growth of magnetic field in a laminar wave front, propagating perpendicular to an external magnetic field, is found as a function of βi, the ratio of ion pressure to magnetic pressure. For values of βi, between 10–2 and 1 the thickness is found to scale as . This scaling is in good agreement with the observed scaling of turbulent shocks, suggesting that for such shocks the shock thickness is closely related to that of the corresponding laminar pulse.