Long term instability growth of radiatively driven thin planar shells

The Rayleigh–Taylor instability of radiatively driven thin copper foils is studied under pure ablation, as well as with beryllium buffers to provide additional pressure drive, in support of the target design for Inertial Confinement Fusion. Modeling was done with the RAGE adaptive mesh refinement code [R. M. Baltrusaitis, M. L. Gittings, R. P. Weaver, R. F. Benjamin, and J. M. Budzinski, Phys. Fluids 8, 2471 (1996)] of experiments done on the OMEGA [T. R. Boehly, D. L. Brown, R. S. Craxton et al., Opt. Commun. 133, 495 (1997)] laser. The copper foils were typically 11.5 μm thick with 0.45 μm amplitude and 45 μm wavelength cosine surface perturbations. The beryllium layer was 5 μm thick. The drive was a “PS26”-like [J. D. Lindl, Phys. Plasmas 2, 3933 (1995)] laser pulse delivering peak 160–185 eV radiation temperatures. Good agreement between experiment and simulation has been obtained out to 4.5 ns. Mechanisms for late time agreement are discussed.