Nonlinear Dust Acoustic Waves, Shocks and Stationary Structures in a DC Glow Discharge Dusty Plasma

Abstract

The dust acoustic wave (DAW) is a very low frequency (tens of Hz) dust density wave in which the dust particles participate in the wave dynamics. The early experimental observations of DAWs showed that the wave was self‐excited by a modest relative ion drift and grew to very high amplitudes (∼100%). In the first part of this paper we describe experiments showing the self‐steepening of nonlinear DAWs into dust acoustic shock waves. In the second part we present observations of self‐organized, stationary (i.e., non‐propagating), stable, dust density structures formed in a DC glow discharge dusty plasma.