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Dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuators, capable of creating a quasi-steady wall jet, are well suited for flow control over the microair vehicles at low Reynolds number. The plasma actuator is usually excited by a sinusoidal high-voltage power with a frequency of a few to tens of kilohertz. However, the investigations on the flowfield produced by a plasma actuator with a frequency below 200 Hz remain limited. Motivated by this demand, the formation and characterization of the vortices generated by a plasma actuator with a high-voltage frequency of 125 Hz are studied in detail. In addition to the starting vortex, it is of great importance that a train of vortices that shed periodically from the junction between the two electrodes and are quite different from the starting vortex are first observed. The shedding frequency of the periodic vortices is the same as the high-voltage frequency of 125 Hz. Combining the acoustic with the flow characteristics of the plasma actuator, the formation mechanism of these periodic vortices is discussed. Finally, a criterion for generating the periodic vortices is proposed based on the relationship between the scale of vortices and the separation distance between the two neighboring periodic vortices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]