Asymptotic Behavior of the Rayleigh-Taylor Instability

We investigate long time numerical simulations of the inviscid Rayleigh-Taylor instability at Atwood number one using a boundary integral method. We are able to attain the asymptotic behavior for the spikes predicted by Clavin and Williams for which we give a simplified demonstration. In particular, we observe that the spike’s curvature evolves as t³, while the overshoot in acceleration shows good agreement with the suggested 1/t⁵ law. Moreover, we obtain consistent results for the prefactor coefficients of the asymptotic laws. Eventually we exhibit the self-similar behavior of the interface profile near the spike.