Designs for highly nonlinear ablative Rayleigh-Taylor experiments on the National Ignition Facility

We present two designs relevant to ablative Rayleigh-Taylor instability in transition from weakly nonlinear to highly nonlinear regimes at the National Ignition Facility [E. I. Moses, J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 112, 012003 (2008)]. The sensitivity of nonlinear Rayleigh-Taylor instability physics to ablation velocity is addressed with targets driven by indirect drive, with stronger ablative stabilization, and by direct drive, with weaker ablative stabilization. The indirect drive design demonstrates the potential to reach a two-dimensional bubble-merger regime with a 20 ns duration drive at moderate radiation temperature. The direct drive design achieves a 3 to 5 times increased acceleration distance for the sample in comparison to previous experiments allowing at least 2 more bubble generations when starting from a three-dimensional broadband spectrum. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4737901]