Experimental evidence of long-range correlations and self-similarity in plasma fluctuations

To better understand long time transport dynamics, techniques to investigate long-range dependences in plasma fluctuations have been applied to data from several confinement devices including tokamaks, stellarators, and reversed field pinch. The results reveal the self-similar character of the edge plasma fluctuations. This implies that the tail of the autocorrelation function decays as a power law and suggests that there is a superdiffusive component of the anomalous transport. Rescaled fluctuation and turbulent flux spectra from different devices also show a strong similarity. For a range of parameters corresponding to the tokamak ohmic regime and equivalent power for other devices, the spectral decay index may show a universal character. [S1070-664X(99)92405-9].