Model of the Rayleigh-Taylor stability of an ablating fluid

An incompressible and inviscid model for the Rayleigh–Taylor stability of an ablating fluid in the absence of convection is presented and solved analytically for boundary conditions appropriate to laser produced plasmas. The wavenumbers k perpendicular to the density gradient of scale length L are found to be relatively insensitive to ablative stabilization for the most unstable radial eigenmodes, k2L2≳1.