Identifying intermittency events in the solar wind

Many complex physical systems in Nature are characterized by intermittency. For these systems, energy at a given scale is not evenly distributed in space and any variable affected by intermittency alternates strong activity to quiescence. Within interplanetary space context, solar wind parameters are highly intermittent. Although the influence of this phenomenon on the scaling of solar wind fluctuations has been evaluated using existing intermittency models, it has never been possible to single out intermittent structures within a given time series until new methods, based on the use of wavelets, have been recently adopted. This new approach to the study of intermittency allows to begin a characterization of those events contributing to solar wind intermittency. Our first results on a single case study of magnetic field intermittency showed that this event was located at the border between two adjacent interplanetary regions mainly characterized by different total pressure and bulk velocity, possibly the border between two adjacent flux-tubes. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.