Theoretical investigation of wave transmission and reflection in a 1D dusty plasma chain with impurities

Abstract

The present paper investigates how an envelope solitary wave reflected and transmitted by one or several impurities in an inhomogeneous dusty plasma. By using the nonlinear Schrödinger equation and the molecular dynamics method, both the reflected waves and the transmitted waves due to impurities produced by an incident envelope solitary waves are given in the present paper. The results show that both the reflection and the transmission are usually envelope solitary waves if incident wave is an envelope solitary wave. The numbers of both the reflected and transmitted envelope solitary wave and the amplitudes of each reflected and the transmitted envelope waves depend on both the mass ratio of impurity to the dust particle and the impurity numbers in dust particle chain. This result may have potential applications. For example, both the reflection and the transmission produced by a given incident envelope solitary wave have the information of the number and the mass of the impurity.