Suppression of Rayleigh Taylor instability in strongly coupled plasmas

Abstract

The Rayleigh Taylor instability in a strongly coupled plasma medium has been investigated using the equations of generalized hydrodynamics. It is demonstrated that the visco-elasticity of the strongly coupled medium due to strong inter particle correlations leads to a suppression of the Rayleigh Taylor instability unless certain threshold conditions are met. The relevance of these results to experiments on laser compression of matter to high densities including those related to inertial confinement fusion using lasers has also been shown.