Geophysical and astrophysical plasmas have characteristics which vary from point to point. The objective of this research is to perform basic laboratory experiments which investigate some of the effects of plasma non-uniformities. The experiments are conducted in a Q-machine and focus on how electrostatic shock waves develop when plasma density pulses are launched into converging magnetic field lines and how ion-acoustic fluctuations are produced by magnetic field currents if a non-uniform magnetic field-aligned bulk plasma flow is also present.
