On the nature of intermittency in weakly dissipative systems
  We propose a new perspective on the intermittency in weakly dissipative systems. It is focused on the elementary (burst-like) event separating states with different properties. This event is seen as a real-space-time manifestation of an instanton connecting in an extended space-time states with distinct topology of the idealized version of the system. 
F. Spineanu and M. Vlad