Numerical study on the laser ablative Rayleigh–Taylor instability

Abstract

The laser ablative Rayleigh–Taylor instability plays an important role in the ignition of inertial refinement fusion. An accurate simulation of this process is important to control the growth of flow instability during the implosion. In this paper, taking the simulations of the hydrodynamics, the laser energy deposition and the electronic thermal conductivity into consideration, a massively parallel laser ablative Rayleigh–Taylor instability code based on Euler method is developed. Some open source codes are used to improve the code development efficiency. The accuracy of the hydrodynamics simulation is tested by an analytical theory about the weakly nonlinear Rayleigh–Taylor instability with double interfaces. The benchmark of an one dimensional heat conductivity is used to test the accuracy of the thermal conductivity simulation. The laser ablative plane target and the laser ablative Rayleigh–Taylor instability are used to test the reliability of the code on the simulation of the whole laser ablative process. It is shown that the confidence of our numerical simulation code is high and the code framework we designed is effective. It can be a basis on studying the problems about the laser ablative instability in inertial refinement fusion.