Effect of plasma parameters on magnetic suppression of the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability in two-fluid plasmas

The Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI) of a shock accelerated perturbed density interface is important in both inertial confinement fusion and astrophysics, where the materials involved are typically in the plasma state. In the single-fluid magnetohydrodynamic model, it has been demonstrated that the plasma RMI can be mitigated by magnetizing the plasma with a sufficiently strong field. We will show that this is also the case in the two-fluid plasma model, which couples a separate set of conservation laws for each species to Maxwell’s equations. We will explore how the suppression mechanism varies with plasma parameters. For low density plasmas with larger plasma length-scales, the mechanism is a Lorentz force driven inversion of the sign of vorticity on the interface. As plasma density increases and plasma length-scales decrease, the vorticity generated by the shock interaction is increasingly transported from the interface by plasma waves.