Laboratory Astrophysics on Collisionless Shocks and Particle Acceleration in the Universe

The origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is still an open question. It is said that the cosmic protons whose energy is less that 1015eV are accelerated in our Galaxy and they are mainly accelerated by supernovae remnants (SNRs). The standard model is the stochastic diffusive acceleration around the shock surface of SNR. It is, however, still an open question how the shock waves are generated and how the electro-magnetic turbulence is generated and dissipated following the shock front. We have proposed a new physical model for the generation of the collisionless shock formation through the Weibel instability. We demonstrate the effect by PIC simulations; however, it is necessary to proof it experimentally in order to persuade the majority of the opinion makers in Astrophysics, who are still skeptical about the simulations after the experience that simulations can reproduce observation data but they contain many adjustable parameters. I would like to explain the physics scenario and also point out that magnetic reconnection should also couple with this phenomenon when current filaments coalesce in the nonlinear stage of the Weibel instability. I will explain the experiments carried out so far with Gekko, LULI2000, Vulcan, Shingang-II, and OMEGA regarding mainly the shock formation in counter-streaming ablating plasmas. We found that in early time the electrostatic collisionless shock is observed. We analyzed the data and find that when the electron temperature is higher than that of the ions such electrostatic shock appears in a short time. According to the scaling law from PIC simulations it is pointed out that the Weibel-mediated shock is produced only with the NIF laser; its proposal has been approved in Science on NIF Committee in 2010. Before the NIF experiment we established an international team, called ACSEL, to do a series of experiments with OMEGA and Hye-Sook. I would like to present recent results obtained with OMEGA and EP experiment on this subject. Finally we also touch on the recent NIF experiment done in the last two years.