KEYWORDSdusty plasma, nonextensivity, nonlinear propagation, solitary waves
INTRODUCTIONA great deal of attention has been paid to understand the linear and nonlinear propagation of electrostatic waves that occur in both space and laboratory dusty plasmas. [1][2][3] Dusty plasmas are ordinary plasmas with an additional, extremely massive, and highly charged component of dust grains. Dusts in plasma, often of micron to submicron size, and masses in the range of 10 6 to 10 12 proton masses, are ubiquitous in the solar system and space plasma, namely, the earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere, lower and upper mesosphere, planetary magnetosphere, the interplanetary medium, planetary rings, asteroid zones, cometary tails, interstellar molecular clouds, circumstellar disks, etc., and in laboratory devices, e.g., dc and RF discharges, plasma processing reactors, and fusion plasma devices. [4][5][6][7] Hence, a study of plasma systems in the presence of dust is of considerable importance. It has been found both theoretically [8] and experimentally [9] that the dynamics of dust grains not only changes the properties of the plasma, but also introduces new or modified wave modes and related instabilities in the dusty plasma systems. [10,11] These wave modes excited in dusty plasmas can be dust-acoustic (DA) waves and dust-ion-acoustic (DIA) waves. [8,12] DA waves predicted theoretically by Rao et al. are among the low-frequency electrostatic dust waves that occur in dusty plasmas. In this case, the dust particle mass provides the inertia and thermal pressures from the electrons, and ions provide the restoring force. These waves have further been observed in laboratory experiments by a number of experimental groups. [13,14] Over the past many years, a number of authors have studied the basic properties of DA waves in dusty plasmas. [15][16][17][18][19] There are different types of coherent linear and nonlinear wave structures in a dusty plasma system, such as solitons, double layers, shocks, vortices etc. [20,21] The nonlinearities come from the harmonic generation involving fluid advection, trapping of particles This article is published with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.