Solitary ionizing surface waves on low-temperature plasmas

A simple model for studying finite-amplitude ionizing nonlinear surface waves propagating in a partially ionized low-temperature plasma, in which collisional effects such as ionization, recombination, and friction are dominant, is proposed. The authors consider the lowest order namely, second order in the fields) nonlinear problem and investigate the evolution of finite-amplitude electromagnetic surface waves. It is shown that the waves are governed by a modified Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation and that new types of solitary waves can exist. The structures of the latter are mathematically similar to, but physically quite different from, that of the KdV soliton