Collisional instabilities in a dusty plasma with recombination and ion-drift effects

Abstract

Instabilities of dust acoustic waves in a plasma with a significant background pressure of neutrals have been investigated. A long wavelength mode is found to be unstable due to recombination of electrons and ions on the surface of dust particles. At short wavelengths, a dissipative instability driven by relative drift between ions and the dust particles is found to be important. Nonlinearly, the short wavelength modes lead to the formation of K-dV solitons whereas the long wavelength end is dominated by modulational instabilities.