Transmission and reflection of an incident pulse in a chain of dust particles

Abstract

Molecular dynamics simulations, the perturbation and scattering methods are used to study the transmission and reflection of an incident pulse due to dust impurities in a chain of dust particles. It is found that the transmission and reflection depend strongly on the number of impurities. How the momentum of both the transmitted and reflected wave depends on that of the incident wave is given analytically and numerically for only one impurity and numerically for multiple impurities. It is worth noting that the amplitude of the transmitted and reflected waves remains a constant when the impurity length exceeds the width of the solitary wave. The present results offer a means of detecting impurities in a dusty plasma crystal by measuring the transmitted-to-incident and reflected-to-incident amplitude ratios because they contain information about the impurities in a dusty plasma crystal.