Representations of currents and magnetic fields in anisotropic magnetohydrostatic plasma: 2. General theory and examples

Abstract

We develop a general treatment of field‐aligned currents in quasi‐static adiabatic plasma. The formalism is an extension of an an earlier analysis (Heinemann, 1990) to include electric and gravitational fields. The assumption that the particle motions are adiabatic along the magnetic field leads to an expression for the total current density that is a generalization of expressions given by Grad (1964) and Vasyliunas (1970). The current density is a vector function of the gradients of the field line constants characterizing the plasma and the gradients of field line integrals of the partial derivatives of the parallel pressure with respect to the constants. The use of the expression as the current source in Ampere's law leads to an equation governing the equilibrium of the system of plasma and magnetic field. Examples based on bi‐Maxwellian distribution functions suggest that the effects of thermal anisotropy can be about as large as the currents due to isotropic plasma and that the effects of parallel electric fields are of the same order of magnitude.