Electrostatic Solitary and Shock Structures in Dusty Plasmas

We present a rigorous theoretical investigation of electrostatic solitary and shock structures that may exist in dusty plasmas, by employing the reductive perturbation technique as well as the pseudo-potential approach. We have focused on dust acoustic solitary waves (DASWs) in a plasma whose constituents are negatively charged cold dust fluid and Boltzmann electrons and ions. We have also investigated the effects of adiabatic dust fluid temperature, non-isothermal (trapped and nonthermal) ion distributions, non-planer (spherical and cylindrical) geometries, strong dust correlation, etc. It is shown that such effects do not only significantly modify the dust acoustic solitary structures, but also introduce some important new features to the DASWs. Furthermore, we have considered the nonlinear propagation of dust acoustic and dust ion-acoustic waves in a dissipative dusty plasma and have shown that they can propagate as shock waves. The implications of our results to space and laboratory dusty plasmas are briefly mentioned.