Extracting Single-Mode Rayleigh--Taylor Instability dynamics from data via SINDy

Abstract

Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) is of fundamental importance in fields such as inertial confinement fusion and supernova explosions, and its evolution is commonly described by potential--flow theory and buoyancy--drag models. However, both types of models struggle to accurately capture the overshoot behavior of bubble and spike velocities, as well as the subsequent reacceleration stage. To address these limitations, we develop a physics-constrained, data-driven framework based on the integral formulation of Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy), which extracts low-dimensional dynamical equations for bubble and spike evolution directly from data. By introducing the nondimensional initial amplitude $A_0 = kη_0$ as an explicit parameter, we identify distinct dynamical equations for the bubble and the spike based on data spanning multiple Atwood numbers and initial amplitudes. The resulting low-dimensional dynamical equations not only reproduce the overshoot behavior of the velocity with good accuracy, but also capture the reacceleration stage well, while maintaining high predictive accuracy at unseen values of the wavenumber, acceleration, and Atwood number. This work provides a physics-constrained, data-driven framework complementary to conventional potential-flow and buoyancy--drag models, accurately describing the dynamical evolution of the bubble and spike at high Atwood numbers, and provides a new perspective for directly extracting the dynamical equations of interfacial instabilities from data.