skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: On the effect of intermittency of turbulence on the parabolic relation between skewness and kurtosis in magnetized plasmas

Journal Article · · Physics of Plasmas
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4835535· OSTI ID:22218420
;  [1]; ;  [2]
  1. Department of Nuclear Techniques, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Association EURATOM, Műegyetem rkp. 9., H-1111 Budapest (Hungary)
  2. MTA Wigner RCP, EURATOM Association, PO Box 49, H-1525 Budapest (Hungary)

This paper is aimed to contribute to the scientific discussions that have been triggered by the experimental observation of a quadratic relation between the kurtosis and skewness of turbulent fluctuations present in fusion plasmas and other nonlinear physical systems. In this paper, we offer a general statistical model which attributes the observed K=aS{sup 2}+b relation to the varying intermittency of the experimental signals. The model is a two random variable model constructed to catch the essential intermittent feature of the real signal. One of the variables is the amplitude of the underlying intermittent event (e.g., turbulent structure) while the other is connected to the intermittency level of the system. This simple model can attribute physical meaning to the a and b coefficients, as they characterize the spatio-temporal statistics of intermittent events. By constructing a particle-conserving Gaussian model for the underlying coherent structures, the experimentally measured a and b coefficients could be adequately reproduced.

OSTI ID:
22218420
Journal Information:
Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 20, Issue 11; Other Information: (c) 2013 Euratom; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1070-664X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English