Abstract
The Rayleigh-Taylor instability in its highly nonlinear, turbulent stage causes atomic-scale mixing of the shell material with the fuel in the compressed core of inertial-confinement fusion targets. The density of shell material mixed into the outer core of direct-drive plastic-shell spherical-target implosions on the 60-beam, OMEGA laser system is estimated to be from time-resolved x-ray spectroscopy, charged-particle spectroscopy, and core x-ray images. The estimated fuel density, , accounts for only of the neutron-burn-averaged electron density, .
- Received 13 December 2001
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.89.085003
©2002 American Physical Society