Session 7IA - Implosion and Hohlraum II.
INVITED session, Thursday morning, November 14
Grand Ballroom, Adam's Mark
The Rayleigh-Taylor instability is an important limitation in ICF capsule designs. Significant work both theoretically and experimentally has been done to demonstrate the stabilizing effects due to material flow through the unstable region. The experimental verification has been done predominantly in planar geometry. Convergent geometry introduces effects not present in planar geometry such as shell thickening and accelerationless growth of modal amplitudes (e.g.\ Bell-Plesset growth). Amplitude thresholds for the nonlinear regime are reduced, since the wavelength of a mode m decreases with convergence \lambda \sim r/m, where r is the radius. We have investigated convergent effects using an imploding cylinder driven by x-ray ablation on the NOVA laser. By doping sections of the cylinder with high-Z materials, in conjunction with x-ray backlighting, we have measured the growth and feedthrough of the perturbations from the ablation front to the inner surface of the cylinder for various initial modes and amplitudes from early time through stagnation. Mode coupling of illumination asymmetries with material perturbations is observed, as well as phase reversal of the perturbations from near the ablation front to the inner surface of the cylinder. Imaging is performed with an x-ray pinhole camera coupled to a gated microchannel plate detector. \par
In collaboration with C. W. Barnes, J. B. Beck, N. Hoffman (LANL), D. Galmiche, A. Richard (CEA/L-V), J. Edwards, P. Graham, B. Thomas (AWE). \par
^**This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. W-7405-ENG-36.