Multicomponent Current Sheet of the Magnetopause with an Arbitrary Energy Distribution of Particles

Abstract

An exact solution to the Maxwell–Vlasov equations has been found for a large class of multicomponent current sheets in collisionless plasma, which describe the spatial structure of the current in the magnetopause and consistent inhomogeneous anisotropic momentum distributions of particles with different effective temperatures. Devised sheets allow a nonmonotonic variation of the magnetic field and can have asymmetric, multihump, and sign-alternating profiles of the current density. Profiles of the current of different particle populations can have different scales, contain countercurrents, and be spatially shifted with respect to each other. The model under consideration is applicable to qualitatively describe a magnetopause separating a magnetosphere of a planet from a solar wind or separating regions of the solar wind with different parameters of the plasma and magnetic field.