Laboratorial radiative shocks with multiple parameters and first quantifying verifications to core-collapse supernovae

TL;DR

This paper reports laboratory experiments simulating core-collapse supernova shocks using xenon gas and laser energy, validating models with experimental data to better understand supernova phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup replicating supernova shock conditions and validates 2D radiation hydrodynamic models against experimental results.

Findings

Higher laser energy increases shock velocity.

Lower xenon gas density results in higher compression.

Models show excellent agreement with experimental data.

Abstract

We present experiments to reproduce the characteristics of core-collapse supernovae with different stellar masses and initial explosion energies in the laboratory. In the experiments, shocks are driven in 1.2 atm and 1.9 atm xenon gas by laser with energy from 1600J to 2800J on the SGIII prototype laser facility. The average shock velocities and shocked densities are obtained from experiments. Experimental results reveal that higher laser energy and lower Xe gas density led to higher shock velocity, and lower Xe gas initial density has a higher compression. Modeling of the experiments using the 2D radiation hydrodynamic codes Icefire shows excellent agreement with the experimental results and gives the temperature. These results will contribute to time-domain astrophysical systems, such as gravitational supernovae, where a strong radiative shock propagates outward from the center of the star after the core collapses.