Head on collision of ion–acoustic shock waves in weakly relativistic electron–positron–ion quantum plasma

Abstract

In this work, we explore analytically the head on collision (HoC) of two ion acoustic shock wave in relativistic quantum plasma. Extended Poincaré Lighthill Kuo(PLK) method has been applied in this problem in a fruitful manner to study the HoC of waves which are rare in literature. Introducing the strained coordinates and expanding the field quantities into the parameter ϵ, a set of differential equations is obtained. Tangent Hyperbolic method is also used while investigating nonlinear interaction of this mode. These techniques are proven to be efficient enough to extract the essence of physics. Our major focus is to study the influence of plasma characteristics on shock wave phase shifts upon a head-on collision. The effects of the ratio of electrons to positron temperature, fractional concentration of positrons, quantum parameter, kinematic viscosity on the phase shift are studied. The findings suggest that shock interactions are distinct from those of solitons. It is also observed that the dispersion and dissipation of the colliding nonlinear structure have a combined role in the occurrence and modification of trajectory variations. The results of this work might be beneficial in studying the propagation and interaction of quantum ion–acoustic shock waves in dense astrophysical plasma systems (white dwarf star) and intense laser-solid density plasma investigations.