New Multifractal Analyses of the Solar Wind Turbulence : Rank-Ordered Multifractal Analysis and Generalized Two-scale Weighted Cantor Set Model

Abstract

Since the work of Burlaga in 1991, various multifractal analyses have been performed to better characterize the intermittency of the fluctuations in the turbulent solar wind. These analyses were based either on the classical structure functions or on the partition function. Recently, two new multifractal analyses have been proposed to better characterize intermittent fluctuations: on one hand, Chang & Wu (2008) proposed a rank-ordered multifractal analysis based on range-limited structure functions instead of the classical ones. On the other hand, Macek & Szczepaniak (2008) have developed a generalized two-scale weighted Cantor set using the partition function technique. Both methods are presented with emphasize on their advantages over the previous multifractal analyses. As an illustration, these new multifractal analyses are applied to a set of magnetic field data measured by Ulysses.