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Updated: May 29, 2025

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Rayleigh-Taylor instability in multiple finite-thickness fluid layers
1Boston University, Department of Physics, 590 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.
Abstract:
We develop a general transfer-matrix formalism for determining the growth rate of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability in a fluid system with spatially varying density and viscosity. We use this formalism to analytically and numerically treat the case of a stratified heterogeneous fluid. We introduce the inviscid-flow approximation in our transfer-matrix formalism to find analytic solutions in the limit of uniform kinematic viscosity for a stratified heterogeneous fluid. We discuss the applicability of these results and a related approximation that also yields analytical solutions in the large-viscosity limit.
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