Particle acceleration by ion-acoustic solitons in plasma

Hideki Ishihara, Ken Matsuno, Masaaki Takahashi, Syuto Teramae

Published 2018-07-27Version 1

We propose a new acceleration mechanism for charged particles by using cylindrical or spherical non-linear acoustic waves propagating in ion-electron plasma. The acoustic wave, which is described by the cylindrical or spherical Kortweg-de Vries equation, grows in its wave height as the wave shrinks to the center. Charged particles confined by the electric potential accompanied with the shrinking wave get energy by repetition of reflections. We obtain power law spectrums of energy for accelerated particles. As an application, we discuss briefly that high energy particles coming from the Sun are produced by the present mechanism.