Turbulent transport processes in a plasma as a diffusion process with random time

Abstract

It is proposed to apply the statistical analysis of the increments of fluctuating particle fluxes to analyzing the probability characteristics of turbulent transport processes in plasma. Such an approach makes it possible to analyze the dynamic probability characteristics of the process under study. It is shown that, in the plasmas of the L-2M stellarator and the TAU-1 linear device, the increments of local fluctuating particle fluxes are of stochastic character and that their distributions are scale mixtures of Gaussians. In particular, for TAU-1, the increments have the Laplacian distribution (which is a scale mixture of Gaussians with an exponential mixing distribution). This implies that the rate of flux variations is a diffusion process with random time. It is shown that the characteristic growth (damping) time of fluctuations is one order of magnitude shorter than their characteristic correlation time. Physical mechanisms that may be responsible for the random character of the growth (damping) of fluctuations are discussed.