Abstract:
Solitary waves are commonly observed in both thermal and nonthermal plasmas. Thermal
plasmas are generally represented by the Maxwellian distribution, whereas the nonthermal plasmas represented by the non-Maxwellian distributions, such as Kappa or Cairns
distributions. Numerous theoretical fluid models have used these distributions to model
the waves in space and laboratory plasmas. However, apart from our recent studies, there
are no attempts to include these distributions in a fluid simulation of waves in plasma.
In this paper, we present an efficient approach to deal with the stability and convergence
of the Poisson solver in the fluid simulation of plasma that follows the Kappa, Maxwell,
and Cairns distributions. We used the stationary iterative methods, namely, Jacobi (JA),
Gauss–Seidel (GS) and Successive Over Relaxation (SOR) in the development of the Poisson solver. Our results show that the SOR method significantly improves the performance
towards the stability and convergence of the Poisson solver for the plasma with all threevelocity distributions. The new fluid code with SOR Poisson solver is applied to examine
the evolutionary characteristics of the ion acoustic solitary waves in a plasma and they are
found to be in agreement with the fluid theory.
