Solitons in weakly nonlinear electron-positron plasmas and pulsar microstructures

Abstract

The propagation of electromagnetic waves in weakly nonlinear, relativistic electron-positron plasmas is investigated. It is shown that the resulting waves can have a solitonic envelope, both for linearly and circularly polarized waves. A dispersion relation is derived, and the results for the linearly polarized case are used to check a recent suggestion of possible self-modulational formation of pulsar microstructure.