Propagation and smoothing of nonuniform thermal fronts

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Abstract
Calculated Rayleigh-Taylor growth for perturbations on ablation fronts may be reduced by an order of magnitude due to thermal smoothing. Because studies of the development of perturbations on ablation layers have generally derived growth rates by assuming that conditions are quasisteady in a reference frame moving with the front, they neglect this stabilizing effect. If confirmed experimentally, this will allow substantial improvements over present designs for inertial confinement fusion implosions. Using a combined Galerkin perturbation technique, we develop analytic models for the propagation of a rippled thermal front into a uniform medium. We find that the mean front advances slightly more rapidly than a uniform front, and the perturbation on the front rapidly dies off.