ST1.10 | Collisionless shocks and associated transient phenomena at Earth and beyond
Collisionless shocks and associated transient phenomena at Earth and beyond
Convener: Ahmad LaltiECSECS | Co-conveners: Savvas RaptisECSECS, Martin LindbergECSECS, Heli Hietala, Andrew Dimmock

Collisionless shocks are ubiquitous in the universe, occurring in diverse astrophysical environments, from planets to galaxy clusters. Significant efforts have been put into understanding their rich dynamics and their effects on the surrounding environments, such as the generation of foreshocks, turbulent sheaths, and characteristic transient phenomena.

Heliospheric shocks offer the unique advantage of being directly accessible by in-situ measurements. Missions, such as Solar Orbiter, STEREO, and Parker Solar Probe have deepened our knowledge of interplanetary shocks and the associated regions, while MMS, Cluster, THEMIS, Cassini, Maven, and others have similarly enhanced our knowledge of planetary bow shocks.

High-performance computing has also played a critical role in filling key knowledge gaps, enabling global and local simulations to provide insights into the nature of collisionless shocks.

Despite these efforts, many questions remain open. In particular, we still do not fully understand the mechanisms associated with certain aspects of particle heating and acceleration, wave generation, wave-particle interaction, and energy redistribution at shocks. Additionally, details about the formation and impact of transient structures, such as hot flow anomalies, foreshock bubbles, cavitons, spontaneous hot flow anomalies, magnetosheath jets, etc. are still unknown.

We thus welcome observational, numerical, and theoretical works that explore plasma processes at collisionless shocks and surrounding regions.