Phase mixing of Langmuir wave in a warm multi-component plasma

An analytical study on the space-time evolution of normal electrostatic modes in a warm multicomponent plasma is presented. A multi-component plasma can be comprised of electrons, ions, dusts etc. Immobile dust grains can be either positively or negatively charged. In this work, they are considered to be distributed uniformly over space with constant density. In a fluid description, a nonlinear analysis of the basic fluid-Maxwell's equations confirms that the excited Langmuir wave can break even at an arbitrarily low amplitude when it is phase-mixed. The nature of the dust-charge as well as the amount of dust grains present in the system can significantly influence the phase-mixing process. The phase-mixing time is also found to increase with the temperature. (author)