Ion- and dust-acoustic solitons in dusty plasmas: Existence conditions for positive and negative potential solutions

The usual description of dust-modified ion-acoustic and dust-acoustic solitons in plasmas containing negative dust is in terms of Boltzmann distributions for the hotter species. In the dust-modified ion-acoustic regime, besides positive potential solitons, negative structures can also be generated, for electrons with a polytropic index γe≠1, as well as for Boltzmann electrons, subject to conditions that are not too stringent. These general conditions were previously either ignored or given for weakly nonlinear solutions only. In the dust-acoustic domain in plasmas with negatively charged dust, however, only negative potential solitons can occur, even when the lighter species have non-Boltzmann distributions. For Boltzmann electrons only an infinite dust compression limits the soliton amplitudes and corresponding Mach numbers, whereas for γe≠1, the electron density, too, can be a limiting factor for the existence domain of such solitons.