Design of a supernova-relevant Rayleigh–Taylor experiment on the National Ignition Facility. I. Planar target design and diagnostics

We present a feasability study for a laser-driven shock experiment on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to study the evolution of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability in the non-linear regime. The experiment is relevant to the problem of material mixing in core-collapse supernovae and is intended to serve as a stepping stone for more realistic Rayleigh–Taylor experiments using spherical geometry.The radiation hydrodynamics simulations described here are done using the CRASH code and include the actual NIF laser drive. It is shown that the simulations are converged with respect to numerical resolution effects. Small-scale imperfections, such as they might be introduced during the process of target fabrication, are found to have negligible impact, provided that their size is smaller than 1 μm. The simulation results are in excellent agreement with a buoyancy-drag model, and the mix layer width is found to increase at higher drive energies.