Head-on collision of dust-acoustic shock waves in strongly coupled dusty plasmas

Abstract

A theoretical investigation is carried out to study the propagation and the head-on collision of dust-acoustic (DA) shock waves in a strongly coupled dusty plasma consisting of negative dust fluid, Maxwellian distributed electrons and ions. Applying the extended Poincaré–Lighthill–Kuo method, a couple of Korteweg–deVries–Burgers equations for describing DA shock waves are derived. This study is a first attempt to deduce the analytical phase shifts of DA shock waves after collision. The impacts of physical parameters such as the kinematic viscosity, the unperturbed electron-to-dust density ratio, parameter determining the effect of polarization force, the ion-to-electron temperature ratio, and the effective dust temperature-to-ion temperature ratio on the structure and the collision of DA shock waves are examined. In addition, the results reveal the increase of the strength and the steepness of DA shock waves as the above mentioned parameters increase, which in turn leads to the increase of the phase shifts of DA shock waves after collision. The present model may be useful to describe the structure and the collision of DA shock waves in space and laboratory dusty plasmas.