Dust acoustic shock waves

It is shown that nonlinear equations governing the dynamics of large amplitude nondispersive dust acoustic waves admit nonstationary dust acoustic shock waves. Analytical and numerical results for the latter are presented, and the relevance of our investigation to laboratory experiments is discussed.

Figure 1

The time evolution of the electrostatic potential (upper panel), dust velocity (middle panel), and dust density (lower panel) with $\alpha =1.1$ and $\tau =100$, for (a) $t=0\mathrm{s}$, (b) $t=0.24\mathrm{s}$, (c) $t=0.48\mathrm{s}$, and (d) $t=0.73\mathrm{s}$.