Discrete breathers in hexagonal dusty plasma lattices

Homoclinic chaos in strongly dissipative strongly coupled complex dusty plasmas

The transport properties of the weakly nonlinear (WNL) two-dimensional (2D) quasilongitudinal dust lattice mode is studied in an experimentally realized highly viscous, strongly coupled, weakly ionized plasma [V. E. Fortov et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 055002 (2012)10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.055002]. The WNL dynamics is found to be described by a 2D dissipative-dispersive nonlinear partial differential equation. The analytical and computational (for gas discharge plasma parameters) results predict strong viscosity induced Shilnikov homoclinic chaos, which, in turn, can cause a phase transition.

Instability of ion kinetic waves in a weakly ionized plasma

The fundamental higher-order Landau plasma modes are known to be generally heavily damped. We show that these modes for the ion component in a weakly ionized plasma can be substantially modified by ion-neutral collisions and a dc electric field driving ion flow so that some of them can become unstable. This instability is expected to naturally occur in presheaths of gas discharges at sufficiently small pressures and thus affect sheaths and discharge structures.