Rayleigh-Taylor instability simulations with CRASH

CRASH is a code package developed for the predictive study of radiative shocks. It is based on the BATSRUS MHD code used extensively for space-weather research. We desire to extend the applications of this code to the study of hydrodynamically unstable systems. We report here the results of Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) simulations with CRASH, as a necessary step toward the study of such systems. Our goal, motivated by the previous comparison of simulations and experiment, is to be able to simulate the magnetic RTI with self-generated magnetic fields produced by the Biermann Battery effect. Here we show results for hydrodynamic RTI, comparing the effects of different solvers and numerical parameters. We find that the early-time behavior converges to the analytical result of the linear theory. We observe that the late-time morphology is sensitive to the numerical scheme and limiter beta. At low-resolution limit, the growth of RTI is highly dependent on the setup and resolution, which we attribute to the large numerical viscosity at low resolution.