Rayleigh-Taylor instability of steady ablation fronts: The discontinuity model revisited

A new model for the instability of a steady ablation front based on the sharp boundary approximation is presented. It is shown that a self-consistent dispersion relation can be found in terms of the density jump across the front. This is an unknown parameter that depends on the structure of the front and its determination requires the prescription of a characteristic length inherent to the instability process. With an adequate choice of such a length, the model yields results, in excellent agreement with the numerical calculations and with the sophisticated self-consistent models recently reported in the literature. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics.