The effects of nonthermality on the interaction of ion-acoustic solitary waves in a plasma consisting of warm adiabatic ions and nonthermal electrons

Abstract

An investigation has been made on the head-on collision of two ion-acoustic solitary waves in an unmagnetized nonthermal plasma whose constituents are warm adiabatic ions and nonthermally distributed electrons. The extended Poincaré–Lighthill–Kuo perturbation method is used to derive the Korteweg–de Vries equations for both compressive and rarefactive ion-acoustic solitary waves in this plasma system. The effects of the ion to electron temperature ratio σ and the nonthermality of the electron distribution α on the interaction and structure of the colliding solitary waves are investigated. It is found that these factors, especially α, can significantly modify the properties of the waves and their collisions, and that the collisions for the two types of solitary waves are very different. It is also important to note that the phase shifts induced by the collision of compressive and rarefactive solitary waves are also different. The relevance of this investigation to the observations in astrophysical plasmas as well as experimental plasmas with nonthermally distributed electrons is briefly pointed out.