Compressibility effects on the Rayleigh-Taylor instability of an ablation front

The influence of the compressibility of the ablating plasma on the Rayleigh-Taylor instability of an ablation front has been analyzed by means of an extension of a previous analytical model. As a result, it is found that the effect of the compressibility is to increase the instability growth rate and to enlarge the range of perturbation wavelengths for which the front is unstable. The magnitude of such effects depends on the values of the Mach and Froude numbers and, for conditions relevant to inertial fusion, the instability may be considerably enhanced. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.