Continuum-kinetic studies of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability

Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instabilities are ubiquitous in plasma physics from astrophysical to laboratory regimes but are traditionally studied using fluid models. In this work, the continuum-kinetic capabilities of the plasma simulation framework Gkeyll are used to simulate the RT instability in 2X3V (2 spatial and 3 velocity space dimensions) for neutral species and 2X2V for plasma. In the neutral case, the effect of collisions on energy transport and RT growth is studied by varying collision mean-free-path. Plasma RT simulations are performed in a kinetic regime, where finite Larmor radius effects become relevant.