Nonlinear dynamics experiments in plasmas

Abstract

The study of nonlinear dynamics or chaos theory has emerged in the last three decades or so as an important interdisciplinary area of research encompassing a wide range of fields like: fluids, plasmas, biomedical sciences, finance, turbulence, astronomy, material sciences, etc. In plasma chaos was first experimentally observed by Boswell. Different other nonlinear dynamics related phenomena like, the intermittency route to a chaos, Homoclinic chaos, Period adding route to chaos and period subtracting, mode locking, period pulling, etc., had been observed by several researchers. In this thesis, we have presented (a) anode glow related observation of chaos to order transition and homoclinic bifurcation; (b) coherence resonance and stochastic resonance; and self organized criticality behavior in glow discharge plasma.