In a toroidal plasma confined by a purely toroidal magnetic field the plasma transport is governed by electrostatic turbulence driven by the flute interchange instability on the low-field side of the torus cross section. In this paper we revisit experimental data obtained from the Blaamann torus at the University of Tromso. On time-scales shorter than the poloidal rotation time, the time series of potential and electron density fluctuations measured on stationary Langmuir probes essentially reflect the spatial poloidal structure of the turbulent field (Taylor hypothesis). On these time scales the signals reveals an intermittent character exposed via analysis of probability density functions and computation of multifractal dimension spectra in different regimes of time scales. This intermittency is associated with the shape and distribution of pronounced spikes in the signal. On time scales much longer than the rotation period there are strong global fluctuations in the plasma potential which are shown to to be the result of low-dimensional chaotic dynamics.
Detailed empirical studies of publicly traded business firms have established that the standard deviation of annual sales growth rates decreases with increasing firm sales as a power law, and that the sales growth distribution is non-Gaussian with slowly decaying tails. To explain these empirical facts, a theory is developed that incorporates both the fluctuations of a single firms sales and the statistical differences among many firms. The theory reproduces both the scaling in the standard deviation and the non-Gaussian distribution of growth rates. Earlier models reproduce the same empirical features by splitting firms into somewhat ambiguous subunits; by decomposing total sales into individual transactions, this ambiguity is removed. The theory yields verifiable predictions and accommodates any form of business organization within a firm. Furthermore, because transactions are fundamental to economic activity at all scales, the theory can be extended to all levels of the economy, from individual products to multinational corporations.
Bursty fluctuations in the scrape-off layer (SOL) of Alcator C-Mod have been analyzed using gas puff imaging data. This reveals many of the same fluctuation properties as Langmuir probe measurements, including normal distributed fluctuations in the near SOL region while the far SOL plasma is dominated by large amplitude bursts due to radial motion of blob-like structures. Conditional averaging reveals burst wave forms with a fast rise and slow decay and exponentially distributed waiting times. Based on this, a stochastic model of burst dynamics is constructed. The model predicts that fluctuation amplitudes should follow a Gamma distribution. This is shown to be a good description of the gas puff imaging data, validating this aspect of the model.
Velocity measurements of wind blowing near the North Sea border of Northern Germany and velocity measurements under local isotropic conditions of a turbulent wake behind a cylinder are compared. It is shown that wind gusts - measured by means of velocity increments - do show similar statistics to the laboratory data, if they are conditioned on an averaged wind speed value. Clear differences between the laboratory data and the atmospheric wind velocity measurement are found for the waiting time statistics between successive gusts above a certain threshold of interest.
We report a similarity of fluctuations in equilibrium critical phenomena and non-equilibrium systems, which is based on the concept of natural time. The world-wide seismicity as well as that of San Andreas fault system and Japan are analyzed. An order parameter is chosen and its fluctuations relative to the standard deviation of the distribution are studied. We find that the scaled distributions fall on the same curve, which interestingly exhibits, over four orders of magnitude, features similar to those in several equilibrium critical phenomena (e.g., 2D Ising model) as well as in non-equilibrium systems (e.g., 3D turbulent flow).
Abel Inversion is currently used in laser-plasma studies in order to estimate the electronic density $n_e$ from the phase-shift map $delta phi$ obtained via interferometry. The main limitation of the Abel method is due to the assumption of axial symmetry of the electronic density, which is often hardly fulfilled. In this paper we present an improvement to the Abel inversion technique in which the axial symmetry condition is relaxed by means of a truncated Legendre Polinomial expansion in the azimutal angle. With the help of simulated interferograms, we will show that the generalized Abel inversion generates accurate densities maps when applied to non axisymmetric density sources.