The damping of the ion-acoustic waves by Coulomb collisions is studied by using the Fokker-Planck equation of Rosenbluth et al. for both the species constituting the plasma, namely the electrons and the ions. In a plasma with weak collisions and in the absence of any external field, one finds that irrespective of the ratio of the ion temperature to the electron temperature, T , the characteristic frequency gets affected only by the electron-ion collisions. However, as far as the collisional

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... ing is concerned, both the ion-ion and the electron-ion collisions play a somewhat equally im-