Modeling of aspheric, diverging hydrodynamic instability experiments on the National Ignition Facility

Abstract One branch of work in the laboratory astrophysics community has been focused on developing the understanding of hydrodynamic mixing in core-collapse supernovae (ccSNe) by the Rayleigh–Taylor instability. Experiments studying these processes in the past have been limited to planar systems in large part due to limitations of drive energy. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is now capable of providing experiments with far more energy than has been previously available on laser facilities, enabling supernova-relevant hydrodynamics in a diverging system. This paper focuses on a proposed design in which hydrodynamic instabilities develop from an aspheric blast-wave driven through multiple, coupled interfaces in a hemispheric target in which the relative masses of the layers are scaled to those within the ccSNe progenitor star. The simulations investigate the diagnosability and experimental value of different designs using a variety of drive conditions.