Superdiffusion and multifractal statistics of edge plasma turbulence in fusion devices

Abstract

The edge plasma turbulence in the T-10 tokamak, the HYBTOK-II tokamak, the linear machine NAGDIS-II and the Large Helical Device have been studied. The fluctuations in the plasma density have been analysed in terms of the multifractal formalism revisited with wavelets.In most of the cases considered, the edge density fluctuations demonstrate multifractal statistics, i.e. the scaling behaviour of the absolute moments is described by a convex function with non-trivial self-similarity properties. The multifractality factor defined in the multiplicative cascade model is a relevant parameter for characterizing the edge plasma turbulence. The multiplicative cascade process has a ‘coarse’ time scale T ∼ 50–200 ms iterating towards finer scales. This time scale is referred to as an integral correlation scale. The self-similarity parameters have been observed to depend on the edge plasma condition. The correlation and transport properties have been analysed regarding the multifractality parameter. The diffusion transport coefficient in an edge plasma is not a trivial function of multifractality parameters.