Self-consistent steady state and dust-ion-acoustic soliton propagation in inhomogeneous plasmas

The steady state of an inhomogeneous collisional dusty plasma is formulated self-consistently and the dust-ion-acoustic soliton propagation in such a plasma is studied by using the reductive perturbation method. The steady state is governed by the ambipolar diffusion theory, which includes the spatially varying collisions of electrons and ions with dust grains and is solved numerically with the boundary value problem. The effects of the nonuniformity of the equilibrium quantities on the solitons are considered. It is shown that the property of the solitons, especially the characteristic width, are sensitive to the variations of the steady state