This paper proposes a clever usage of bispectral analysis for extracting or reconstructing a quasi-coherent and quasi-periodic structural evolution of plasma fluctuations. The method has been applied on electron temperature fluctuation signals measured with a multi-point electron cyclotron emission (ECE) radiometer in the Large Helical Device (LHD). The method successfully reconstructs the averaged spatiotemporal evolution of fluctuating coherent structure (Inagaki et al 2011 Phys. Rev. Lett.107 115001), while the structure is buried in (or comparable in power to) background fluctuations. The bicoherence analysis has found the faint fluctuating structure consisting of a fundamental mode and the harmonic modes from the existence of significant couplings between them. The reconstructed spatiotemporal structure with the proposed method is compared with that obtained with the lock-in (conditional) average. Three cases of spatiotemporal evolution of the non-sinusoidal waveform are presented.
Electrostatic ion cyclotron waves in a steady-state toroidal plasma