To appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research, 1995.
We have developed a means of producing a steady state hybrid simulation of a collisionless shock. The shock is stopped in the simulation box by transforming into the shock frame and by modifying the downstream boundary conditions to allow the plasma to flow through the simulation box. Once the shock is stationary in the box frame, the simulation can be run for an arbitrary time with a fixed box size and a fixed number of simulation particles. Using this technique, we have shown that certain gross properties associated with the shock, such as the particle distribution functi on (including energetic particles produced by Fermi acceleration) and the flow speed profile, are constant (except for statistical variations) over hundreds of gyroperiods when averaged over times short compared to the average residence t ime of energetic particles. Our results imply that any microphysical processes responsible for particle heating and/or injection into the Fermi mechanism can be viewed as smooth and continuous on timescales longer th an a few gyroperiods.
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