The effect of Gaussian white noise on the fractality of fluctuations in the plasma of a symmetrical discharge

Highlights: •We study the white Gaussian noise effect on the fractality of plasma fluctuations. •Multifractality strength is increased by the noise, at all inter-anode voltages. •New positive influence of noise resulting in an increasing of the predictability. •Identifying the fluctuations nature: chaotic or stochastic by multifractal analysis. •Noise changes the position of the maximum in the singularity spectra. - Abstract: In this work we investigate the influence of white Gaussian noise on the fluctuations in the plasma of a symmetrical discharge using multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis. We observe that in the range of noise intensity used in our study, the multifractality strength is increased by the noise, at all values of the inter-anode voltage, both for original and filtered time-series. This is interpreted as a new positive influence of noise because this effect can be understood as an increasing in the predictability on the dynamics in a time-series. A constructive influence of noise can appear only for fluctuations with underlying chaotic dynamics. The shuffling analysis demonstrates that the multifractality is purely a consequence of the correlations of the fluctuations. The noise influence is also observed in the change of the position of the maximum in the singularity spectra. The multifractal detrended cross correlation between light intensity and current intensity demonstrates that the fluctuations in both parameters are generated by the same physical processes though they are very different in nature: one is a local parameter and the other is a global one