Excitation and control of chirped nonlinear ion acoustic waves

Large amplitude ion acoustic waves are excited and controlled by a chirped frequency driving perturbation. The process involves capturing into autoresonance (a continuous nonlinear synchronization) with the drive by passage through the linear resonance in the problem. The transition to autoresonance has a sharp threshold on the driving amplitude. The theory of this transition is developed beyond the Korteweg-de-Vries limit by using the Whitham’s averaged variational principle within the water bag model and compared with Vlasov-Poisson simulations.