Solitary potentials in dusty plasma

It is found that a dusty plasma with inertial dust fluid and Boltzmann distributed ions admits only negative solitary potentials associated with nonlinear dust-acoustic waves. The dynamics of small-amplitude disturbances is governed by the Korteweg-de Vries, (KdV) equation, the stationary solution of which assumes the inverted bell-shaped secant hyperbolic squared profile. The associated dust and ion density perturbations are, on the other hand, positive. The solitary potentials can be identified as nonlinear structures in low-temperature dusty plasmas such as those in laboratory and astrophysical environments. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.