On the effect of intermittency of turbulence on the parabolic relation between skewness and kurtosis in magnetized plasmas

Abstract

This paper is aimed to contribute to the scientific discussions that have been triggered by the experimental observation of a quadratic relation between the kurtosis and skewness of turbulent fluctuations present in fusion plasmas and other nonlinear physical systems. In this paper we offer a general statistical model which attributes the observed $K = aS^2 + b$ relation to the varying intermittency of the experimental signals. The model is a two random variable model constructed to catch the essential intermittent feature of the real signal. One of the variables is the amplitude of the underlying intermittent event (e.g. turbulent structure) while the other is connected to the intermittency level of the system. This simple model can attribute physical meaning to the $a$ and $b$ coefficients, as they characterize the spatio-temporal statistics of intermittent events. By constructing a particle-conserving Gaussian model for the underlying coherent structures the experimentally measured $a$ and $b$ coefficients could be adequately reproduced.