Ion-acoustic shock in a collisional plasma

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the propagation of ion-acoustic shock waves in a collision dominated plasma. We firstly establish the existence and uniqueness of a small-amplitude smooth travelling wave, then justify its approximation to the shock profile of the KdV-Burgers equations in a suitable asymptotic regime where dissipation in terms of viscosity coefficient is much stronger than dispersion by the Debye length, and prove in the end the large time asymptotic stability of travelling waves under suitably small smooth perturbations.