Investigation of multifractal nature of floating potential fluctuations obtained from a dc glow discharge magnetized plasma

In this paper, multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) has been used to analyze the floating potential fluctuations obtained with a Langmuir probe from a dc glow discharge magnetized plasma device. The generalized Hurst exponents (h(q)), local fluctuation function (Fq(s)), the Rényi exponents (τ(q)) and the multifractal spectrum F(α) have been calculated by applying the MF-DFA method. The result of the MF-DFA shows the multifractal nature of these fluctuations. We have investigated the influence of magnetic field on the multifractal nature of the fluctuations and it is seen that degree of multifractality is reduced with the increase in the magnetic field strength. The values of h(q) have been restricted between 0.7 and 1 for the magnetized fluctuations. This result is evidence of the existence of long-range correlations in the fluctuations. Furthermore, we employed shuffle and surrogate approaches to analyze the origins of multifractality. Comparing the MF-DFA results for the data set to those for shuffled and surrogate series, we have found that its multifractal nature is due to the existence of significant long-term correlation.