Contribution of higher order terms in electron-acoustic solitary waves with vortex electron distribution

Abstract

The basic equations describing the nonlinear electron-acoustic waves in a plasma composed of a cold electron fluid, hot electrons obeying a trapped/vortex-like distribution, and stationary ions, in the long-wave limit, are re-examined through the use of the modified PLK method. Introducing the concept of strained coordinates and expanding the field variables into a power series of the smallness parameter epsilon, a set of evolution equations is obtained for various order terms in the perturbation expansion. The evolution equation for the lowest order term in the perturbation expansion is characterized by the conventional modified Korteweg-deVries (mKdV) equation, whereas the evolution equations for the higher order terms in the expansion are described by the degenerate(linearized) mKdV equation. By studying the localized traveling wave solution to the evolution equations, the strained coordinate for this order is determined so as to remove possible secularities that might occur in the solution. It is observed that the coefficient of the strained coordinate for this order corresponds to the correction term in the wave speed. The numerical results reveal that the contribution of second order term to the wave amplitude is about 20 %, which cannot be ignored.