A two-dimensional ion acoustic solitary wave in a weakly relativistic plasma

Abstract

The two-dimensional Korteweg-de Vries equation is first derived for a weakly relativistic ion acoustic wave propagating in a collisionless plasma. We show that the relativistic effect greatly influences the phase velocity, the amplitude and the width of a solitary wave solution, and that the presence of streaming ions gives rise to the formation of a precursor. We also discuss three limiting cases of the present results.