Growth rates of the ablative Rayleigh-Taylor instability in inertial confinement fusion

A simple procedure is developed to determine the Froude number Fr, the effective power index for thermal conduction nu, the ablation-front thickness L-0, the ablation velocity V-a, and the acceleration g of laser-accelerated ablation fronts. These parameters are determined by fitting the density and pressure profiles obtained from one-dimensional numerical simulations with the analytic isobaric profiles of Kull and Anisimov [Phys. Fluids 29, 2067 (1986)]. These quantities are then used to calculate the growth rate of the ablative Rayleigh-Taylor instability using the theory developed by Goncharov et al. [Phys. Plasmas 3, 4665 (1996)]. The complicated expression of the growth rate (valid for arbitrary Froude numbers) derived by Goncharov et al, is simplified by using reasonably accurate fitting formulas. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.