Rayleigh–Taylor instability in plasmas with shear flow

Abstract

The temporal evolution of the Rayleigh–Taylor instability in plasma with homogeneous shear flow is studied. It is found that shear flow leads to the suppression of nonlinearly excited perturbations of the electrostatic potential for a value of the velocity shear parameter, which is larger than the ones obtained earlier for the stabilization of the linearly unstable solution. However, even in this case the stabilization of the electrostatic potential is a real physical process, not a mathematical artifact. At the same time, the perturbation of the electron density is not suppressed by flow shear. After the stage of the temporal algebraic growth, oscillations of the electron density perturbations with permanent amplitudes are settled.