Envelope solitary waves exist and collide head-on without phase shift in a dusty plasma

Heng Zhang; Xin Qi; Wen-Shan Duan; Lei Yang

doi:10.1038/srep14239

Envelope solitary waves exist and collide head-on without phase shift in a dusty plasma

Sci Rep. 2015 Sep 18:5:14239. doi: 10.1038/srep14239.

Authors

Heng Zhang¹, Xin Qi¹, Wen-Shan Duan¹, Lei Yang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ College of Physics and Electronic Engineering and Joint Laboratory of Atomic and Molecular Physics of NWNU &IMP CAS, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070 and Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China.
² Department of Physics, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China.

Abstract

The rarefactive KdV solitary waves in a dusty plasma have been extensively studied analytically and found experimentally in the previous works. Though the envelope solitary wave described by a nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) has been proposed by using the reductive perturbation method, it is first verified by using the particle-in-cell (PIC) numerical method in this paper. Surprisingly, there is no phase shift after the head on collision between two envelope solitary waves, while it is sure that there are phase shifts of two colliding KdV solitary waves after head on collision.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't