Stability of a Shock-Decelerated Ablation Front

摘要

Experimental study of a shock-decelerated ablation front is reported. A planar solid plastic target is accelerated by a laser across a vacuum gap and collides with a lower-density plastic foam layer. While the target is accelerated, a fast Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) growth of the seeded single- mode perturbation at the ablation front is observed. After the collision, the velocity of the ablation front is seen to remain constant. The re-shock quenches the RT growth but does not trigger any Richtmyer-Meshkov growth at the ablation front, which is shown to be consistent with both theory and simulations.