Collisionless plasma transport across loop magnetic fields

Abstract

Collisionless transport properties of a plasma across loop magnetic fields devoid of a toroidal component are considered. In particular, chaotic single particle orbits in the geomagnetic tail are used to calculate the collisionless electrical conductivity. It is shown that the stochasticity from inhomogeneous magnetic fields leads to a power law decay of the single particle correlation function similar to an elastic collisional process. The height integrated dissipative part of the collisionless conductivity governs the irreversible stochastic heating of the plasma sheet. Formulas for the electrical conductivity as a function of the finite gyroradius parameter and the aspect ratio of the magnetic field loops are derived and tested numerically.