On a semiclassical model for ion-acoustic solitons in ultrarelativistic pair plasmas and its classical counterpart

Large ion-acoustic solitary waves are investigated in a multispecies plasma model consisting of warm positive ions in the presence of ultrarelativistic electrons and positrons, in a Sagdeev pseudopotential formalism. A parametric investigation determines existence regions in terms of fractional densities, temperature ratios, and soliton speeds. Various examples of pseudopotential functional forms, as well as those of the resulting soliton and electric field profiles, can then be generated numerically, and some typical illustrations have been included. Rather than adiabatic pressure-density relations for the hot species, the classical nonrelativistic counterpart involves Boltzmann distributions, which differ qualitatively from the literature. Surprisingly, the soliton and electric field profiles show scant differences at the same compositional parameters between the two extremes even though the physical description of the hot species is radically different. A brief comparison has also been included between the fully nonlinear Sagdeev pseudopotential descriptions and their respective associated weak-amplitude limits (treated via a reductive perturbation technique) in which nonlinearities have been truncated to low powers of the electrostatic potential. Again, the soliton profiles are not radically different at comparable amplitudes, leaving the underlying physical reasons for such a similarity an open problem.