Analysis of the two-dimensional turbulence in pure electron plasmas by means of advanced statistical techniques

Highly magnetized, pure electron plasmas confined in a Penning-Malmberg trap allow one to perform experiments on the two-dimensional (2D) fluid dynamics under conditions where non-ideal effects are almost negligible. Recent results on the freely decaying 2D turbulence obtained from experiments with electron plasmas performed in the Penning-Malmberg trap ELTRAP are presented. The analysis has been applied to experimental sequences with different types of initial density distributions. The dynamical properties of the system have been investigated by means of wavelet transforms and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD). The wavelet analysis shows that most of the enstrophy is contained at spatial scales corresponding to the typical size of the persistent vortices in the 2D electron plasma flow. The POD analysis allows one to identify the coherent structures which give the dominant contribution to the plasma evolution. The statistical properties of the turbulence have been investigated by means of Probability Density Functions (PDFs) and structure functions of spatial vorticity increments. The analysis evidences how the shape and evolution of the dominant coherent structures and the intermittency properties of the turbulence strongly depend on the initial conditions for the electron density.