Solitons, shocks and vortices in dusty plasmas

Abstract

Three important classes of nonlinear phenomena, namely solitons, shocks and vortices in dusty plasmas, have been discussed. The static and mobile charged dust grains have been considered in order to study all of these nonlinear phenomena. The effects of nonplanar geometry, dust grain charge fluctuations, dust fluid temperature, vortex-like ion distribution, strong dust correlation etc on the properties of dust ion-acoustic/dust-acoustic solitons have also been analysed. The implications of these theoretical investigations in experimental observations of soliton and shock formation in dusty plasmas are briefly discussed.