Some aspects of nonlinear phenomena in dusty plasmas

Abstract

In recent decades the heuristic features of soliton dynamics and formation of sheath in plasma has spurred many researchers. As a result, there has been always a competition between the theory and experiments as well as an effort to correlate the observations to various plasma configurations in space and astrophysical environments. The nonlinear wave dynamics is heralded through the augmentation of small amplitude wave and also by the consideration of propagation of arbitrary amplitude wave. Therefore, different procedures have been developed for studying nonlinear wave dynamics. Another aspect of primary importance in this context is the plasma configuration, e.g. multi component plasma embedded in a magnetic field and plasma contaminated with charged dust grains. In particular, dusty plasma has attracted much attention in recent times. The thesis has the main motivation to highlight the salient features of the soliton dynamics and sheath formation in general plasmas as well in dusty plasma, which happen to be ubiquitous. The study could be of interest for space and laboratory plasmas and thus has potential for possible application in plasma technology. As the dusty plasma represents the most general form of space, laboratory and industrial plasma, it is a vital discipline of plasma research together with other plasma configurations. It has been seen that earlier investigations on dusty plasmas were confined around the dust charging model development and the effects of dust grains on high frequency collective plasma properties under isolated approximation of dust grains. However, theoretical activities on the dynamical effects of the dust grains within collective approximation picked up momentum at around eighties and a novel feature on plasma acoustic mode was identified as Dust Acoustic Wave (DAW) and also confirmed by experiments. This was a watershed event, which gave an enormous acceleration to the growth of dusty plasma research within the collective approximation. The thesis has been organized as follows: