Long term instability growth of radiatively driven thin planar shells

The authors study Rayleigh-Taylor instability of radiatively driven thin copper foils under pure ablation, as well as with beryllium tampers to provide additional pressure drive. Modeling was done with the RAGE adaptive mesh refinement code of experiments done on the NOVA and OMEGA lasers. The copper foils were typically 11.5 {micro}m thick with 0.45 {micro}m amplitude, 45 {micro}m wavelength cosine surface perturbations. The beryllium layer was 5 {micro}m thick. The drive was a P26-like laser pulse delivering a 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