Dissipative solitary wave at the interface of a binary complex plasma

The propagation of a dissipative solitary wave across an interface is studied in a binary complex plasma. The experiments were performed under microgravity conditions in the PK-3 Plus Laboratory on board the International Space Station using microparticles with diameters of 1.55 micrometre and 2.55...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2018-05
Main Authors: Sun, Wei, Schwabe, Mierk, Thomas, Hubertus M, Lipaev, Andrey M, Molotkov, Vladimir I, tov, Vladimir E, Feng, Yan, Yi-Fei, Lin, Zhang, Jing, Cheng-Ran, Du
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Deceleration
Drag
Dusty plasmas
International Space Station
Ion drag
Microgravity
Microparticles
Multinational space ventures
Solitary waves
Wave crest
Wave propagation
Wave reflection
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Summary:The propagation of a dissipative solitary wave across an interface is studied in a binary complex plasma. The experiments were performed under microgravity conditions in the PK-3 Plus Laboratory on board the International Space Station using microparticles with diameters of 1.55 micrometre and 2.55 micrometre immersed in a low-temperature plasma. The solitary wave was excited at the edge of a particle-free region and propagated from the sub-cloud of small particles into that of big particles. The interfacial effect was observed by measuring the deceleration of particles in the wave crest. The results are compared with a Langevin dynamics simulation, where the waves were excited by a gentle push on the edge of the sub-cloud of small particles. Reflection of the wave at the interface is induced by increasing the strength of the push. By tuning the ion drag force exerted on big particles in the simulation, the effective width of the interface is adjusted. We show that the strength of reflection increases with narrower interfaces.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1805.11362