Abstract
The propagation of solitary electron acoustic waves in an unmagnetized collisionless plasma is studied by use of the reductive perturbation method. A modified Korteweg-de Vries (mKdV) equation that contains the lowest-order nonlinearity and dispersion is derived from the lowest order of perturbation. The higher-order dispersive effects have to be taken into account and higher-order solutions are obtained. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.