A UNIFIED THEORY OF AURORAL POTENTIAL STRUCTURES

Steady-state nonlinear potential structures in the auroral plasma are formulated in terms of an integral equation that expresses the conservation of total pressure. By specifying appropriately the conservation constants and boundary conditions of the effective potential function, the integral curves yield respectively three types of solutions: nonlinear Langmuir waves, ion-acoustic solitons and double layers. The similarities and differences of the existence conditions for these nonlinear potential structures are discussed.