Intermittent Properties of Solar Wind Fluctuations

In this paper we offer a short review of the most significant non-Gaussian properties of solar wind fluctuations as observed in interplanetary space. Several decades of in-situ observations of plasma and magnetic field fluctuations have shown that the tails of their distributions do not follow a Gaussian statistics in the sense that the strongest events have a probability to happen much stronger than that they would have if they were normally distributed. Moreover, this feature becomes more and more evident as we observe shorter and shorter scales. This behavior is commonly identified as "intermittent" within the context of MHD turbulence. Recent studies focused on these intermittent events and tried to unravel their intrinsic nature and origin. It appears that the intermittent component of interplanetary fluctuations is due to static structures, flux-tube like, advected by the wind and possibly related to the complicate magnetic field topology existing at the base of the corona.