Electric Field along a Magnetic Line of Force in a Low-Density Plasma

Abstract

Stationary states of a collisionless plasma in a narrow axially symmetric magnetic mirror field are considered. It is shown that if the electric field vanishes identically along the magnetic field, then the angular distributions of ion and electron velocities must agree at each point. In a general case, when this condition on the distributions is not fulfilled, there is an electric field parallel with the magnetic field.