Dust-acoustic solitary waves in a self-gravitating warm opposite polarity dusty plasma

Abstract

A theoretical investigation is made to study the propagation of dust-acoustic solitary waves in a general and realistic self-gravitating dusty plasma system containing positively as well as negatively charged warm dust species and nonthermally distributed ion species. The standard reductive perturbation method is employed to derive the Korteweg–de Vries equation which admits the solitary wave solution. The parametric regimes for the existence of dust-acoustic solitary waves associated with electrostatic and self-gravitational potentials are obtained. It is shown that the population of nonthermal ion species significantly modifies the basic features of the dust-acoustic solitary waves. The significant effects of ratios of mass, temperature, and number density of positively charged dust species to those of negatively charged one on the basic properties (namely, phase speed, polarity, amplitude, and width) of the dust-acoustic solitary waves are also identified. A brief comparison between electrostatic and self-gravitational solitary potential structures is also made. The implications of our results to different space and laboratory dusty plasma environments, where opposite polarity dust grains are observed, are briefly discussed.

Keywords:

• Self-gravitating dusty plasma
• dust-acoustic solitary waves
• nonthermally distributed ions

Data Availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Acknowledgments

A. Mannan gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (Bonn, Germany) through its post-doctoral research fellowship. The authors are very grateful to both anonymous reviewers for their all constructive suggestions which have significantly improved the quality of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.