Weakly two-dimensional dust acoustic waves

For dust acoustic waves in unmagnetized plasma comprising cold dust grains and both isothermal electrons and ions, small but finite amplitude nonlinea r waves are governed by the Korteweg-de Vries equation. The weakly transver se long wavelength perturbations for nonlinear dust acoustic waves are inve stigated in this paper. It has been shown that the governing equation for t his process is the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation. It suggests that the tr ansverse perturbations for the nonlinear acoustic solitary waves in a dusty plasma are stable. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.