EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES ON INTERMITTENT PHENOMENA IN A PLASMA

An intermittent process occurring in a low-temperature plasma discharge has been investigated. During a continuous scan of the discharge voltage, one kind of intermittency evolves from random upward bursts to a periodic oscillation, while the other evolves to chaos from random downward bursts. A critical exponent concerning the onset of the latter intermittency is quantitatively determined to be \gamma = 0.912.