Observation of intermittency in edge plasma of SUNIST tokamak

The temporal intermittency of the fluctuation-driven particle transport fluxes is analysed by using data obtained from Langmuir probe array in the edge of the Sino-United Spherical Tokamak (SUNIST). The conditional statistics analysis indicates that the intermittent structures have a characteristic time width of about 30μs, which is the typical fluctuation time scaling. It is also found that the transport fluxes have a multifractal character over the fluctuation time scales, and exhibit a long-time-range correlation character with self-similar parameter H>0.5 in the plasma confinement time scales. Furthermore, the analyses show that the level of the intermittency and the long-range correlation of the fluxes vary with increasing plasma density. These observations are consistent with the prediction of the avalanche-like model.