Drift waves and chaos in a LAPTAG plasma physics experiment

Abstract

In a project involving an alliance between universities and high schools, a magnetized plasma column with a steep pressure gradient was established in an experimental device. A two-dimensional probe measured fluctuations in the plasma column in a plane transverse to the background magnetic field. Correlation techniques determined that the fluctuations were that of electrostatic drift waves. The time series data were used to generate the Bandt-Pompe entropy and Jensen-Shannon complexity for the data. These quantities, when plotted against one another, revealed that a combination of drift waves and other background fluctuations were a deterministically chaotic system. Our analysis can be used to tell the difference between deterministic chaos and random noise, making it a potentially useful technique in nonlinear dynamics.