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We summarize recent attempts to unravel the role of plasma kinetic effects in radiation mediated shocks. Such shocks form in all strong stellar explosions and are responsible for the early electromagnetic emission released from these events. A key issue that has been overlooked in all previous works is the nature of the coupling between the charged leptons, that mediate the radiation force, and the ions, which are the dominant carriers of the shock energy. Our preliminary investigation indicates that in the case of relativistic shocks, as well as Newtonian shocks in multi-ion plasma, this coupling is driven by either, transverse magnetic fields of a sufficiently magnetized upstream medium, or plasma microturbulence if strong enough magnetic fields are absent. We discuss the implications for the shock breakout signal, as well as abundance evolution and kilonova emission in binary neutron star mergers.
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Electromagnetic draping of merging neutron stars
We first derive a set of equations describing general stationary configurations of relativistic force-free plasma, without assuming any geometric symmetries. We then demonstrate that electromagnetic interaction of merging neutron stars is necessarily dissipative due to the effect of electromagnetic draping—creation of dissipative regions near the star (in the single magnetized case) or at the magnetospheric boundary (in the double magnetized case). Our results indicate that even in the single magnetized case we expect that relativistic jets (or "tongues") are produced, with correspondingly beamed emission pattern.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908590
- PAR ID:
- 10481209
- Publisher / Repository:
- Physical Review E,
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Physical Review E
- Volume:
- 107
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2470-0045
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.107.025205
