Coherent puff and slugs in transitional drift-wave turbulence

The long-term development of the transitional regime of drift-wave turbulence is studied in a magnetized plasma column by means of the conditional-average technique. In the transitional regime, small changes in the magnetic-field strength as control parameter lead to large changes in the correlation times, indicating the existence of a critical point of an underlying nonequilibrium continuous phase transition. This and the spatiotemporal dynamics shows similarities to puff splitting, slug-gap splitting, and puff jamming.