第九届青年地学论坛

Force-free current sheets, characterized by field-aligned electric currents and approximately uniform plasma pressures, have been widely observed throughout the heliosphere. Recent observations of force-free current sheets have clearly shown the anisotropic electron distributions with different temperatures in the perpendicular and parallel directions. Despite the development of many kinetic equilibrium models for 1D force-free current sheets, they all assume isotropic electron distributions, which necessitates the construction of models that can account for the observed anisotropy. In this work, we develop a model for anisotropic force-free current sheets, by incorporating the magnetic moment as an additional invariant of motion into the electron distribution function of an isotropic model. Although our model should be treated as an approximation under specific conditions, these conditions are satisfied in most cases of the space plasma environments. The applicability of our model is then validated via a comparison to a typical force-free current sheet in the Jovian magnetodisk, which show good agreements between the modeled and the observational data.
 

current sheet,force-free,Anisotropy