Ion-Neutral Collisional Effect on Solitary Waves in Weakly Ionized Plasma with Cairns–Gurevich Distribution of Electrons

An investigation on ion acoustic solitary waves has been presented in a weakly ionized plasma in the occurrence of ion-neutral collision with united effects of trapped and non-thermal electrons. Ion-neutral collision plays a very important role on the propagation of solitary waves in a weakly ionized plasma. In this work, damped Korteweg-de Vries-like Schamel equation has been derived using reductive perturbation technique and its approximate analytical solitary wave solution has been determined, for the first time, using momentum conservation law of Korteweg-de Vries-like equation. It has been observed that the structures of the solitary wave are highly dependent on ion-neutral collisional frequency (ν), non-thermal parameter (b) and trapped to free electron temperature ratio (β). It has been shown that the amplitude of the solitary wave decreases prominently as the non-thermal parameter (b) and the ion-neutral collision frequency (ν) enhance. But, only amplitude of the solitary wave increases with the increasing value of trapped to free electron temperature ratio (β). It has been noticed that b and ν affect the amplitude and width of the solitary wave but β affects only on the amplitude of the solitary wave. The obtained results are important to study the nonlinear waves in laboratory and in the universe where partially ionized plasma exists. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature India Private Limited.