Wavelet analysis of two-dimensional turbulence in a pure electron plasma

Abstract

Highly magnetized pure electron plasmas confined in Penning-Malmberg traps allow to perform accurate experiments on effective two-dimensional (2D) fluid dynamics under well-controlled experimental conditions. Detailed experimental investigations of free decaying turbulence in a pure electron plasma using multi-resolution analysis (MRA) are presented. Coherent structures are extracted from the flow using a wavelet-based recursive denoising algorithm with an adaptative self-consistent threshold. The scaling behaviors of measured enstrophy and energy distributions are obtained and compared with recent experiments and theoretical predictions for 2D turbulence.