Proceedings of the Conference on Nonlinear Coherent Structures in Physics and Biology,
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, July 95

Solitary Ion-acoustic Waves in a Plasma With Negative Ions and Non-isothermal Electrons

E.J. Parkes

Department of Mathematics,
University of Strathclyde,
Livingstone Tower, Richmond Street,
Glasgow G1 1XH, Scotland.

Abstract

The Sagdeev potential formalism is used to investigate the propagation characteristics of a finite amplitude compressive solitary ion-acoustic wave in a collisionless plasma comprising cold positive and negative ions and non-isothermal electrons. Attention is focused mainly on the effects of the degree of non-isothermality.

For strong non-isothermality and to lowest order, small amplitude waves have a sech^4 form. Higher order corrections to this are obtained via the Sagdeev potential rather than using the more usual method of reductive perturbation with renormalization. Existing results in the literature derived using the latter approach are corrected and extended.

Conference paper.

ABSTRACTS
NextPreviousIndex
Last modified Mon Apr 8 16:25:00 GB-Eire 1996 (DBD)