Laser-driven planar Rayleigh-Taylor instability experiments

Abstract

We have performed a series of experiments on the Nova Laser Facility to examine the hydrodynamic behavior of directly driven planar foils with initial perturbations of varying wavelength. The foils were accelerated with a single, frequency doubled, smoothed and temporally shaped laser beam at 0.8×${10}^{14}$ W/${\mathrm{cm}}^2$. The experiments are in good agreement with numerical simulations using the computer codes LASNEX and ORCHID which show growth rates reduced to about 70% of classical for this nonlinear regime.