Observation of hydrodynamic instability in spherical target implosion with a Gekko XII green laser

The authors have investigated the stability of an ablatively imploded spherical target in the initial stage of acceleration using a Gekko XII green laser (10 kJ/liter ns at 0.53 μm). The faint corrugation fabricated on a target outer surface grew exponentially with time, which follows the model of the Rayleigh-Taylor (R-T) instability with classical growth rates up to kδ ≅ 2π, where k is the wave number of the surface corrugation and δ is the amplitude of the instability