Generality of deterministic chaos, exponential spectra, and Lorentzian pulses in magnetically confined plasmas.

The dynamics of transport at the edge of magnetized plasmas is deterministic chaos. The connection is made by a previous survey [M. A. Pedrosa et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 3621 (1999)] of measurements of fluctuations that is shown to exhibit power spectra with exponential frequency dependence over a broad range, which is the signature of deterministic chaos. The exponential character arises from Lorentzian pulses. The results suggest that the generalization to complex times used in studies of deterministic chaos is a representation of Lorentzian pulses emerging from the chaotic dynamics.