A nominally plane turbulent jet is synthesized by the interactions of a train of counter-rotating vortex pairs that are formed at the edge of an orifice by the time-periodic motion of a flexible diaphragm in a sealed cavity. Even though the jet is formed without net mass injection, the hydrodynamic impulse of the ejected fluid and thus the momentum of the ensuing jet are nonzero. Successive vortex pairs are not subjected to pairing or other subharmonic interactions. Each vortex of the pair develops a spanwise instability and ultimately undergoes transition to turbulence, slows down, loses its coherence and becomes indistinguishable from the mean jet flow. The trajectories of vortex pairs at a given formation frequency scale with the length of the ejected fluid slug regardless of the magnitude of the formation impulse and, near the jet exit plane, their celerity decreases monotonically with streamwise distance while the local mean velocity of the ensuing jet increases. In the far field, the synthetic jet is similar to conventional 2D jets in that cross-stream distributions of the time-averaged velocity and the corresponding rms fluctuations appear to collapse when plotted in the usual similarity coordinates. However, compared to conventional 2D jets, the streamwise decrease of the mean centerline velocity of the synthetic jet is somewhat higher(∼x−0.58),and the streamwise increase of its width and volume flow rate is lower(∼x0.88 and ∼x0.33, respectively).This departure from conventional self-similarity is consistent with the streamwise decrease in the jet’s momentum flux as a result of an adverse streamwise pressure gradient near its orifice. ©1998 American Institute of Physics.