High-resolution imaging of the Rayleigh-Taylor Vortex Breakdown at the National Ignition Facility

The Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability is heavily studied in the high-energy-density physics community, but there remains much potential for improvement in imaging small-scale vortex structures generated at the RT spike tip. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is capable of delivering accelerated flows driven by strong shocks to study these hydrodynamically unstable systems with unprecedented clarity. Previous works utilized diagnostics with insufficient spatial resolution to observe the detailed morphology of RT spikes as they evolve through the nonlinear regime and transition to turbulence. This talk will demonstrate that the newly installed Crystal Backlighter Imager (CBI) is capable of resolving scales in the inertial subrange, a feature expected in high-Reynolds-number flows. It is shown that by adapting a well-characterized NIF platform to accommodate the CBI, higher-resolution radiography can be obtained for benchmarking simulations of instability growth and the transition to turbulence.