Conditional Eddies in Plasma Turbulence

Conditional structures, or eddies, in turbulent flows are discussed with special attention to electrostatic turbulence in plasmas. The potential variation of these eddies is obtained by sampling the fluctuations only when a certain condition is satisfied in a reference point. The resulting structure has a simple physical interpretation.

It is here demonstrated that correlation functions of the type ( phi n(x1,t1) phi (x2,t2)) for n=1, 2, . . ., which are relatively easy to obtain, contain sufficient information to construct the conditional eddies. Experimentally obtained correlation functions illustrate the analysis.