Spike morphology in supernova-relevant hydrodynamics experiments

This presentation describes experiments performed on the Omega and Omega EP lasers exploring the 3D Rayleigh-Taylor instability at a blast-wave-driven interface. The laser irradiates a plastic disk and creates a planar blast wave, which then crosses the interface between the disk and a lower-density foam, inducing the Rayleigh-Taylor instability. The plastic disk has an intentional pattern machined at the plastic/foam interface. This seed perturbation is three-dimensional with a basic structure of two orthogonal sine waves with a wavelength of 71 $\mu $m and amplitude of 2.5 $\mu $m. Interface structure has been detected under these conditions using x-ray radiography, and some of the resulting data will be shown. Current experiments are further examining the features of the unstable interface using proton radiography.