The technique of tracing along magnetic field lines is widely used in magnetospheric physics to provide a ‘‘magnetic frame of reference’’ that facilitates both the planning of experiments and the interpretation of observations. The precision of any such magnetic frame of reference depends critically on the accurate representation of the various sources of magnetic field in the magnetosphere. In...

Under a common potential, a finite mixture of ellipsoidal velocity distributions satisfying the Boltzmann collisionless equation provides a set of integrability conditions that may constrain the population kinematics. They are referred to as conditions of consistency and were discussed in a previous paper on mixtures of axisymmetric populations. As a corollary, these conditions are now extended...

We consider low-Reynolds-number axisymmetric flow about two spheres using a novel, biharmonic stream function. This enables us to calculate analytically not only the forces, but also the dipole moments stresslets and pressure moments and the associated resistance functions. In this paper the basics properties of axisymmetric flow and the stream function are discussed. Explicit series expansions...