Turbulent transport processes in a plasma as a diffusion process with random time

It is proposed to apply the statistical analysis of the increments of fluct uating particle fluxes to analyzing the probability characteristics of turb ulent transport processes in plasma. Such an approach makes it possible to analyze the dynamic probability characteristics of the process under study. It is shown that, in the plasmas of the L-2M stellarator and the TAU-1 lin ear device, the increments of local fluctuating particle fluxes are of stoc hastic character and that their distributions are scale mixtures of Gaussia ns. In particular, for TAU-1, the increments have the Laplacian distributio n (which is a scale mixture of Gaussians with an exponential mixing distrib ution). This implies that the rate of flux variations is a diffusion proces s with random time. It is shown that the characteristic growth (damping) ti me of fluctuations is one order of magnitude shorter than their characteris tic correlation time. Physical mechanisms that may be responsible for the r andom character of the growth (damping) of fluctuations are discussed. (C) 2001 MAIK "Nauka/Interperiodica".