Well-posedness for moving interfaces in anisotropic plasmas

Abstract

We study the local-in-time well-posedness for an interface that separates an anisotropic plasma from a vacuum. The plasma flow is governed by the ideal Chew-Goldberger-Low (CGL) equations, which are the simplest collisionless fluid model with anisotropic pressure. The vacuum magnetic and electric fields are supposed to satisfy the pre-Maxwell equations. The plasma and vacuum magnetic fields are tangential to the interface. This represents a nonlinear hyperbolic-elliptic coupled problem with a characteristic free boundary. By a suitable symmetrization of the linearized CGL equations we reduce the linearized free boundary problem to a problem analogous to that in isotropic magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). This enables us to prove the local existence and uniqueness of solutions to the nonlinear free boundary problem under the same non-collinearity condition for the plasma and vacuum magnetic fields on the initial interface required by Secchi and Trakhinin (Nonlinearity 27:105-169, 2014) in isotropic MHD.