Derivation of electrostatic Korteweg–deVries equation in fully relativistic two-fluid plasmas

Abstract

A second order Korteweg–deVries (KdV) equation that describes the evolution of nonlinear electrostatic waves in fully relativistic two-fluid plasmas is derived without any assumptions restricting the magnitudes of the flow velocity and the temperatures of each species. In the derivation, the positive and negative species of plasmas are treated with equal footings, not making any species specific assumptions. Thus, the resulting equation, which is expressed in transparent form symmetric in particle species, can be applied to any two-fluid plasmas having arbitrarily large flow velocity and ultrarelativistically high temperatures. The phase velocity of the nonlinear electrostatic waves found in this paper is shown to be related to the flow velocity and the acoustic wave velocity through the Lorentz addition law of velocities, revealing the relativistic nature of the formulation in the present study. The derived KdV equation is applied to some limiting cases, and it is shown that it can be reduced to existing results in nonrelativistic plasmas, while there are some discrepancies from the results in the weak relativistic approximations.