Solitary waves in a degenerate relativistic plasma with ionic pressure anisotropy and electron trapping effects

Abstract

The dynamics of obliquely propagating ion-acoustic (IA) waves in the presence of ionic pressure anisotropy and electron trapping effects is studied in a dense magnetoplasma, containing degenerate relativistic trapped electrons and dynamical (classical) ions. By using the plane wave solution, a modified linear dispersion relation for IA waves is derived and analyzed with different limiting cases and various plasma parameters both analytically and numerically. For nonlinear analysis, a reductive perturbation technique is employed to obtain a Zakharov-Kuznetsov equation involving the weakly nonlinear IA excitations. It is shown that the electron thermal correction and ionic pressure anisotropy strongly modify the wave amplitudes and width attributed to weakly nonlinear IA waves. The stability criterion for stable/unstable solitary pulses is also discussed with variations of angle (β) and temperature ratio (σ). A reduction and domain splitting of unstable excitations into sub-domains with stable and unstable potential pulses are pointed out for electron temperature ratio in the range of 0.01 < σ < 0.3 for degenerate relativistic trapped electrons. Moreover, the ionic pressure anisotropy also considerably affects the stability of solitary potentials in the non-relativistic and ultra-relativistic regimes. The obtained results might be useful for understanding the nonlinear dynamics and propagation characteristics of waves in superdense plasmas, in the environments of white dwarfs and neutron stars, where the electron thermal and ionic pressure anisotropy effects cannot be ignored.