Classical Rayleigh-Taylor Instability Experiments at Nova

Physics – Plasma Physics

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Scientific paper

Hydrodynamic instabilities impact a wide range of physical systems, from inertial confinement fusion (ICF) capsules to supernovae. The ICF community has devoted a great deal of effort to understanding the development of instabilities at an ablation front, where the shortest wavelengths are predicted to be stabilized. We(in collaboration with B. A. Remington, S. V. Weber, T. A. Peyser, and T. S. Perry) have performed a series of experiments investigating the evolution of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability at an embedded, or classical, interface. Without the stabilizing influence of ablation, short wavelengths should grow strongly and behavior in the deep nonlinear regime of growth should be accesible. This strong growth of short wavelengths allows us to study the interaction of multiple modes superposed at the embedded interface. As the growth proceeds, the modes will begin to couple and it is predicted that an inverse cascade will occur, with progressively larger structures dominating the flow. In our initial experiments a single mode perturbation placed at the interface between a brominated plastic ablator and a titanium payload was studied. These results were compared to the growth of similar perturbations placed at an ablation front to conclusively demonstrate the effect of ablative stabilization. Subsequent experiments were devoted to the study of a superposition of 2, 10, or 20 modes to observe the effects of mode coupling and bubble competition processes. The technique was also extended to the study of two modes initially below the experimental resolution which were diagnosed by the appearance of the longer-wavelength coupled mode, demonstrating the technique of ``subresolution imaging''. Recent experiments have attempted to observe the process of bubble competition directly, by placing a pattern of alternating small and large bubbles at the interface and watching the evolution of the smaller bubble relative to its larger neighbor.

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