Modifying mixing and instability growth through the adjustment of initial conditions in a high-energy-density counter-propagating shear experiment on OMEGA
Counter-propagating shear experiments conducted at the OMEGA Laser Facility have been evaluating the effect of target initial conditions, specifically the characteristics of a tracer foil located at the shear boundary, on Kelvin-Helmholtz instability evolution and experiment transition toward nonlinearity and turbulence in the high-energy-density (HED) regime. Experiments are focused on both identifying and uncoupling the dependence of the model initial turbulent length scale in variable-density turbulence models of k-ϵ type on competing physical instability seed lengths as well as developing a path toward fully developed turbulent HED experiments. We present results from a series of experiments controllably and independently varying two initial types of scale lengths in the experiment: the thickness and surface roughness (surface perturbation scale spectrum) of a tracer layer at the shear interface. We show that decreasing the layer thickness and increasing the surface roughness both have the ability to increase the relative mixing in the system, and thus theoretically decrease the time required to begin transitioning to turbulence in the system. In addition, we also show that we can connect a change in observed mix width growth due to increased foil surface roughness to an analytically predicted change in model initial turbulent scale lengths.