Impact of Shock Front Nonstationarity on the Acceleration of Heavy Ions by Perpendicular Collisionless Shocks

Both hybrid /full particle simulations and recent experimental results have clearly evidenced that the front of a supercritical quasi-perpendicular shock can be nonstationary and corresponds to the self-reformation of the front itself being due to the accumulation of reflected ions. Not only the amplitude but also the spatial scales of fields components at the front (ramp and foot) are strongly varying within each cycle of the self- reformation. On the other hand, several studies have been made on the acceleration and heating of heavy ions but most have been restricted to a stationary shock profile only. Herein, one-dimensional test particle simulations with fields components issued from self-consistent 1D PIC simulation are performed in order to investigate the impact of shock front non-stationarity on heavy ion acceleration (He, O, Fe). Reflection and acceleration mechanisms of heavy ions with different initial thermal velocities and different charge-mass ratios interacting with a non-stationary shock front (self-reformation) are analyzed in detail. Present preliminary results show that: (i) the heavy ions suffer shock drift acceleration (SDA) and shock surfing acceleration (SSA) mechanisms and will be compared with previous works; (ii) the fraction of reflected heavy ions increases with initial kinetic energy, charge-mass ratio and decreasing shock front width at both stationary shock (situation equivalent to fixed shock regime) and non-stationary shocks (situation equivalent to a continously time-evolving shock regime); (iii) the shock front non-stationarity facilitates the reflection of heavy ions for broad (rather than narrow) shock profiles; (iv) high energy part of Fe/O ratio spectra at a non-stationary shock decreases with shock ramp width. The impact of the shock front non-stationarity on the heavy ions spectra within the shock front region and the downstream region will be also discussed