Abstract
The propagation and the head-on collision of nonlinear dust-acoustic solitary waves (DASWs) in dusty plasmas consisting of electrons, ions and negative as well as positive dust particles are investigated. Applying an extended Poincare-Lighthill-Kuo (PLK) method, Kortwege-de Vries equations and analytical phase shifts after the head-on collision of two DASWs in dusty plasmas are obtained. Analytically and numerically, the relevance of the phase shifts and trajectories to the positive-to-negative dust number density ratio, the ratio of the ion number density to negative dust number density, negative-to-positive dust particle mass ratio, and the ion-to-electron temperature ratio effects is explicitly demonstrated. Moreover, the current findings are applied to different regions of space, viz. cometary tails, mesosphere, Jupiter's magnetosphere.