Demonstration of Scale-Invariant Rayleigh-Taylor Instability Growth in Laser-Driven Cylindrical Implosion Experiments
Joshua Sauppe, S. Palaniyappan, Benjamin Tobias, J. L. Kline, Kirk Flippo, O. L. Landen, D. Shvarts, S. H. Batha, Paul A. Bradley, Eric Loomis, Nomita Vazirani, Codie Fiedler Kawaguchi, L. Kot, D. W. Schmidt, Thomas Day, A. B. Zylstra, Elad Malka
Abstract
Rayleigh-Taylor instability growth is shown to be hydrodynamically scale invariant in convergent cylindrical implosions for targets that varied in radial dimension and implosion timescale by a factor of 3. The targets were driven directly by laser irradiation providing a short impulse, and instability growth at an embedded aluminum interface occurs as it converges radially inward by a factor of 2.25 and decelerates on a central foam core. Late-time growth factors of 14 are observed for a single-mode m=20 azimuthal perturbation at both scales, despite the differences in laser drive conditions between the experimental facilities, consistent with predictions from radiation-hydrodynamics simulations. This platform enables detailed investigations into the limits of hydrodynamic scaling in high-energy-density systems.