Nonlinear Waves in an Inhomogeneous Plasma

Abstract

The foregoing accounts were concerned with nonlinear waves in a homogeneous plasma. It may be noted that nonlinear waves get modified in an essential way in an inhomogeneous plasma. For instance, the amplitude, width, and propagation velocity of an ion-acoustic solitary wave will change as the latter moves in an inhomogeneous plasma (Nishikawa and Kaw [194], John and Saxena [195], Rao and Varma [196], Shivamoggi [197, 198], Kuehl [199, 200], Chang et al. [201]). Another essential effect of plasma inhomogeneity is that often the instabilities become convective and the matching of selection rules for resonant wave-wave interactions is destroyed in a distance short compared with effective growth lengths (Chakraborty [202, 203], Rosenbluth et al. [204, 205], Pesme et al. [206], Liu et al. [207], Lee and Kaw [208], Pramanik [209], Grebogi and Liu [210], Lindegren et al. [211]). Here, we will give a brief discussion of the propagation characteristics of ion-acoustic solitary waves in an inhomogeneous plasma. For the other effects of plasma inhomogeneity on nonlinear waves, we refer the reader to the original literature cited above.