Abstract
When a fluid pushes on and accelerates a heavier fluid, small perturbations at their interface grow with time and lead to turbulent mixing. The same instability, known as the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, operates when a heavy fluid is supported by a lighter fluid in a gravitational field. It has a particularly deleterious effect on inertial-confinement-fusion implosions and is known to operate over 18 orders of magnitude in dimension. We propose analytic expressions for the bubble and spike amplitudes and mixing widths in the linear, nonlinear, and turbulent regimes. They cover arbitrary density ratios and accelerations that are constant or changing relatively slowly with time. We discuss their scalings and compare them with simulations and experiments.
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