Arbitrary amplitude ion-acoustic solitary excitations in the presence of excess superthermal electrons

Velocity distribution functions with an excess of superthermal particles are commonly observed in space plasmas, and are effectively modeled by a kappa distribution. They are also found in some laboratory experiments. In this paper we obtain existence conditions for and some characteristics of ion-acoustic solitary waves in a plasma composed of cold ions and κ-distributed electrons, where κ>3/2 represents the spectral index. As is the case for the usual Maxwell–Boltzmann electrons, only positive potential solitons are found, and, as expected, in the limit of large κ one recovers the usual range of possible soliton Mach numbers, viz., 1