Abstract:
The observation of dust in the rings of Saturn by instruments on board the Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and Cassini missions triggered
our interest in exploring the evolution of electrostatic dust acoustic waves (DAWs) in the Saturnian magnetospheric dusty plasma. The
salient features of dust-acoustic electrostatic solitary waves have been examined by means of numerical simulations that adopted a fluid
algorithm. We considered highly energetic non-Maxwellian ion and electron populations, in combination with inertial dust. The ions
and electrons were modeled by kappa distributions to account for the long-tailed particle distribution featuring a strong suprathermal
component. At equilibrium, the initial density perturbation in the dust density was used to trigger the evolution of DASWs propagating
in non-Maxwellian dusty plasma. Our main focus is to determine the comprehensive role of the dust concentration and the suprathermal
index (kappa) of the ion and electron populations in the generation and evolution of DASWs. These simulation results are thought to
be relevant for (and applicable in) existing experimental data in space, especially in the magnetosphere of Saturn, but also in other
planetary plasma environments that are presumably characterized by the presence of charged dust.
