Ablation Effects on Weakly Nonlinear Rayleigh-Taylor Instability with a Finite Bandwidth

Abstract

A weakly nonlinear but numerically tractable model (to third order in amplitude and including bandwidth effects) has been developed for the ablative Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability. Model results clearly show growth reduction from linear ablative RT values and even amplitude saturation in some realistic cases. For excitation of a band of wave numbers near the cutoff for growth, the behavior is dominated by the mode with the largest linear growth rate, and not by the mode with the largest initial amplitude. This type of model is likely to be important for the future assessment of the RT effects on specific target designs of the inertial confinement fusion.