480 single pulses from PSR 0809+74, recorded at 102.5 MHz with a time resolution of 10μs, have been analyzed by the time delay technique in order to look for the parameters of deterministic chaos in the microstructure of radio pulses. The correlation dimension n was shown to be less than 5 in more than 20% of the analyzed pulses. This means that on such occasions the microstructure of pulsar radio emission with the time scales 10 to 100μs may be determined by the behavior of a nonlinear dynamical system with comparatively small numbers of independent parameters. For example, the observed low dimensional chaos may result from a turbulence process associated with the outflow of plasma—as in versions of the polar cap model where microstructure can be interpreted as reflecting the spatial structure of relativistic plasma outflow in the radio emission region.

However, the correlation-time distribution demonstrates the tendency for microstructure to consist of a random sequence of unresolved micropulses in the majority of cases, which means in the framework of polar cap models the presence of well developed turbulence in the relativistic plasma outflow.