Nonlinear oscillations in a cold dissipative plasma

Abstract

Recently, it has been shown that when viscosity and resistivity is included in the cold plasma model, nonlinear plasma oscillations exhibit a new nonlinear effect in the form of splitting of density peak [Infeld et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 145005 (2009)]. Infeld et al. have analytically derived this result for a specific model of viscosity as 4/3νe=ν[n0/ne(x,t)]. In a realistic case however, electron viscosity has a relatively weak dependence on density through Coulomb logarithm. In this work, first Infeld’s result is numerically extended for the more realistic case where electron viscosity is chosen to be independent of density and second an alternative electron dissipative mechanism is studied by substituting viscosity with hyperviscosity. In both cases, results are found to be qualitatively similar to Infeld et al.