Stability of a shock-decelerated ablation front

Experimental study of a shock-decelerated ablation front is reported. A planar solid plastic target is accelerated by a laser across a vacuum gap and collides with a lower-density plastic foam layer. While the target is accelerated, a fast Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) growth of the seeded single-mode perturbation at the ablation front is observed. After the collision, the velocity of the ablation front is seen to remain constant. The reshock quenches the RT growth but does not trigger any Richtmyer-Meshkov growth at the ablation front, which is shown to be consistent with both theory and simulations.