Ionic KdV Structure in Weakly Collisional Plasmas

Abstract We consider the one-dimensional ions dynamics in weakly collisional plasmas governed by the Vlasov–Poisson–Landau system under the Boltzmann relation with the small collision frequency $$\nu >0$$ ν > 0 . It is observed in physical experiments that the interplay of nonlinearities and dispersion may lead to the formation of ion acoustic solitons that are described by the Korteweg–de Vries equation. In this paper, to capture the ionic KdV structure in the weak-collision regime, we study the combined cold-ions limit and longwave limit of the rescaled VPL system depending on a small scaling parameter $$\epsilon >0$$ ϵ > 0 . The main goal is to justify the uniform convergence of the VPL solutions to the KdV solutions over any finite time interval as $$\epsilon \rightarrow 0$$ ϵ → 0 under restriction that $$\epsilon ^{3/2}\lesssim \nu \lesssim \epsilon ^{1/2}$$ ϵ 3 / 2 ≲ ν ≲ ϵ 1 / 2 . The proof is based on the energy method near local Maxwellians for making use of the Euler–Poisson dynamics under the longwave scaling. The KdV profiles, in particular including both velocity field and electric potential, may have large amplitude, which induces the cubic velocity growth. To overcome the $$\epsilon $$ ϵ -singularity in such multi-parameter limit problem, we design delicate velocity weighted energy functional and dissipation rate functional in the framework of macro-micro decomposition that is further incorporated with the Caflisch’s decomposition. As an application of our approach, the global-in-time existence of solutions near global Maxwellians when the KdV profile is degenerate to a constant equilibrium is also established under the same scaling with $$\epsilon ^{3}\lesssim \nu \lesssim \epsilon ^{5/2}$$ ϵ 3 ≲ ν ≲ ϵ 5 / 2 . For the proof, the velocity weight is modified to depend on the solution itself, providing an extra quartic dissipation so as to obtain the global dynamics for most singular Coulomb potentials.