Stable spatial Langmuir solitons as a model of long-lived atmospheric plasma structures

TL;DR

This paper models stable Langmuir solitons in plasma using nonlinear Schrödinger equations, explaining long-lived atmospheric plasma structures and plasmoids, with potential applications in atmospheric physics and laboratory experiments.

Contribution

It introduces new stability conditions for Langmuir solitons via nonlocal interactions and a cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation, advancing understanding of atmospheric plasma phenomena.

Findings

Stable solitons can be maintained by electron-electron interactions.

A new cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrödinger equation accounts for ion dipole interactions.

Numerical solutions show conditions for long-lived atmospheric plasma structures.

Abstract

I study stable spatial Langmuir solitons in plasma based on nonlinear radial oscillations of charged particles. I discuss two situations when a Langmuir soliton can be stable. In the former case the stability of solitons against the collapse is due to electron-electron interactions which result in the nonlocal terms in the nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation. In the latter situation I derive the new cubic-quintic nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation with accounts for the interaction of induced dipole moments of diatomic ions with a rapidly oscillating electric field and show that the collapse of Langmuir waves can be also arrested. In both cases I find the numerical solutions of the nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation and analyze their stability using the Vakhitov-Kolokolov criterion. I discuss the application of my results for the description of long-lived atmospheric plasma structures. I show that, using my model, one can explain the existence of atmospheric plasmoids in the upper ionosphere. It is also demonstrated that Langmuir solitons described by the cubic-quintic nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation can describe atmospheric plasmoids at the initial stages of their evolution. Note that, besides the modeling of atmospheric plasma structures, my results can be applied for the explanation of the results of experiments where long-lived glowing plasmoids weere obtained in electric discharges in liquid nitrogen.