Structural ion-sound plasma turbulence as a self-similar random process

Abstract

It is shown that the experimentally investigated structural ion-sound plasma turbulence is a self-similar stationary random process. The self-similarity parameter is determined by two temporal laws: the nonrandom character of the appearance of nonlinear structures (nonlinear ion-sound solitons) in the plasma, and the nonlinear interaction between them. As the distance from the threshold of the ion-sound current instability increases, the self-similar random process approaches a Gaussian random process, but this limit has not been attained experimentally. The possibility of recording superlong time series of the fluctuations of the signal of the plasma process and processing of the time series by the R/S analysis method has made it possible to prove self-similarity of the plasma structural turbulence.