Studies of Laser-driven Radiative Blast Waves

We have performed two sets of experiments looking at laser-driven radiating blast waves. In the first set of experiments the effect of a drive laser’s passage through a background gas on the hydrodynamical evolution of blast waves was examined. The laser’s passage heated a channel in the gas, creating a region where a portion of the blast wave front had an increased velocity, leading to the formation of a bump-like protrusion on the blast wave. The second set of experiments involved the use of regularly spaced wire arrays used to induce perturbations on a blast wave surface. The decay of these perturbations as a function of time was measured for various wave number perturbations and found to be in good agreement with theoretical predictions.