Solitary ion acoustic waves in a plasma with
negative ions and non-isothermal electrons
E. John Parkes, Strathclyde Univ., Glasow
The Sagdeev potential formalism is used to investigate the propagation
characteristics of a finite amplitude compressional 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.
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