Arbitrary amplitude dust acoustic waves in a high energy-tail ion distribution are investigated. The effects of charge variation and ion suprathermality on the large amplitude dust acoustic (DA) soliton are then considered. The correct suprathermal ion charging current is rederived based on the orbit motion limited approach. In the adiabatic case, the variable dust charge is expressed in terms of the Lambert function and we take advantage of this transcendental function to show the existence of rarefactive variable charge DA solitons involving cusped density humps. The dust charge variation leads to an additional enlargement of the DA soliton, which is less pronounced as the ions evolve far away from Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. In the nonadiabatic case, the dust charge fluctuation may provide an alternate physical mechanism causing anomalous dissipation the strength of which becomes important and may prevail over that of dispersion as the ion spectral index κ increases. Our results may provide an explanation for the strong spiky waveforms observed in auroral electric field measurements by Ergun et al. [Geophys. Res. Lett. 25, 2025 (1998)].
The combined effects of ionization, ion loss, and electron suprathermality on dust ion-acoustic solitary waves in a collisional dusty plasma are examined. Carrying out a small but finite amplitude analysis, a damped Korteweg-de Vries (dK–dV) equation is derived. The damping term decreases with the increase of the spectral index and saturates for Maxwellian electrons. Choosing typical plasma parameters, the analytical approximate solution of the dK-dV equation is numerically analyzed. We first neglect the ionization and ion loss effects and account only for collisions to estimate the relative importance between these damping terms which can act concurrently. Interestingly, we found that as the suprathermal character of the electrons becomes important, the strength of the collisions related dissipation becomes more important and causes the dust ion-acoustic solitary wave amplitude to decay more rapidly. Moreover, the collisional damping may largely prevail over the ionization and ion loss related damping. The latter becomes more effective as the electrons evolve far away from their thermal equilibrium. Our results complement and provide new insights into previously published work on this problem.
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