A numerical study of gravity driven instability in strongly coupled dusty plasmas.Part I: Rayleigh-Taylor instability and Buoyancy-driven instability

Abstract

Rayleigh-Taylor and Buoyancy-driven instabilities are very common instabilities for an inhomogeneous medium. We examine here how these instabilities grow for incompressible viscoelastic fluids like a strongly coupled dusty plasma by using incompressible generalized hydrodynamic (i-GHD) fluid model. Since the dust particles are pretty massive, the gravitational attraction of earth has a significant role in its dynamics. In this paper the acceleration due to gravity g and the role of strong coupling in the context of gravitationally stratified dusty plasma fluid have been considered. We find that the appearance of elasticity speed up the growth of viscoelastic RT instability by reducing the effect of viscosity at timescales shorter than the Maxwell relaxation time τ m . The buoyancy driven situation with spatially localized (in both dimensions) of low/high density regions placed in a background medium has also been evolved in the presence of gravity. Our studies show that both the instabilities get suppressed with increasing coupling strength of the medium. This suppression has been illustrated analytically as well as by carrying out a two-dimensional fully nonlinear simulation.