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Updated: May 29, 2025

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Evolution of radiative thermal instability in a confined medium
Henry Fetsch1, Nathaniel J Fisch1
1Princeton University, Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.
Abstract:
Thermally bistable fluid tends to self-organize into clouds of hot and cold material, which are internally uniform and separated by thin conduction fronts. The evolution of these clouds has been studied for isobaric systems, but when pressure is instead treated as a dynamical quantity and allowed to evolve self-consistently, fundamentally different dynamics appear. Such a treatment is necessary in some laboratory plasmas, whose volume is constrained but whose pressure can vary. Solutions are derived for the evolution of clouds, accounting for pressure variation and interactions between conduction fronts. Additional stable configurations and secondary instabilities are derived, which may be relevant to fusion plasmas and to the study of photoionized plasma in the laboratory.
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