Presented By: Department Colloquia
Department Colloquium | Matter at Extreme Temperatures and Pressures: Rayleigh-Taylor instability growth across vast scales
Carolyn Kuranz (U-M Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences)
High-energy-density plasmas (HED) exist throughout our universe in an extreme state with temperatures greater than 10^5 K (~10 eV) and pressures greater than 10^6 atm (1 Mbar). On the largest scale, such as in a supernova, HED plasma systems can be billions of cm in size; on the smaller end, inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments at the National Ignition Facility can be one tenth of a cm. Due to pressure, density, and velocity gradients in these systems, several hydrodynamic processes can occur (Rayleigh-Taylor, Richtmyer Meshkov and Kelvin Helmholtz) in both astrophysical systems and laboratory experiments creating complex structures or even turbulence across these vast scales. I will describe how laboratory experiments can be scaled to emulated hydrodynamic processes present in astrophysical systems and new techniques to diagnose sub-micron scales planned for the University of Michigan’s ZEUS laser relevant to fusion experiments.