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 GKEYLL are used to simulate the RT instability in 2X2V (2 spatial and 2 velocity space dimensions) for a singly-ionized plasma in a regime where finite Larmor radius and nonlocal transport effects are relevant. Collisional effects have significant impact on the evolution of the instability, and comparisons are drawn between collisionless and collisional simulations at a variety of Knudsen numbers.