Solitons in dusty plasmas with positive dust grains

Abstract

Although “typical” micrometer-sized dust grains in a space or laboratory plasma are often negatively charged because of collisions with the mobile electrons, there are environments in which grains may take on a positive charge. We consider a dusty plasma composed of electrons, positive ions and positive dust grains, and use the fluid dynamic paradigm to identify existence domains in parameter space for both dust-acoustic (DA) and dust-modified ion-acoustic (DIA) solitons. Only positive potential DA solitons are found. This represents an expected antisymmetry with the case of negative dust, where previously only negative solitons were reported. However, whereas for negative dust DIA solitons of either sign of potential may exist, we find that for the case of positive dust, DIA solitons are restricted to positive potentials only. The results for both positive and negative dust are consistent with an hypothesis that, in the absence of flows, the sign(s) of the soliton potential coincide(s) with the sign(s) of the species whose inertia is included in the calculation; i.e., the cold, supersonic species present in the plasma.