Our journal Laser and Particle Beams is devoted to covering trends and development in basic and applied physics in the research area of high power particle and laser beam interaction with matter. Including this issue, we published a total of 64 articles in 2008. This amounts to a decrease in the number of published articles of about 10% while at the same time the total number of printed pages stays close to the annual page limit of 700 pages. This is fully in line with the editorial policy to give authors ample room to describe their results in full detail, and moreover to put it into a perspective of the main topics that we want to cover in Laser and Particle Beams. Since Laser and Particle Beams has a very high impact factor of 4.696, the submission rate to our journal increases steadily. Therefore, we have to expect a slight delay in publication of accepted articles. However, the editorial board will try to have all relevant articles published as soon as possible by turning out the first issue of next year earlier as usual.
This year we also introduced a new section which we call: Invited Review article. The first of these articles to appear in this section covers trends in stimulated Brillouin scattering (Ostermeyer et al., Reference Ostermeyer, Kong, Kovalev, Harrison, Fotiadi, Megret, Kalal, Slezak, Yoon, Shin, Beak, Lee, Lu, Wang, Lin, Knight, Kotova, Straber, Scheikh-Obeid, Riesbeck, Meister, Eichler, Wang, He, Yoshida, Fujita, Nakatsuka, Hatae, Park, Lim, Omatsu, Nawata, Shiba, Antipov, Kuznetsov and Zakharov2008) and this paper is 66 printed pages long. On the other hand, we also want to encourage short communication related to new developments. The first example of such short communication is by Hora & Hoffmann, Reference Hora and Hoffmann2008. The decision to give authors as much printing space as they need to describe their results found good resonance among the authors. Some examples of detailed papers are Rodriguez et al. (Reference Rodríguez, Florido, Gil, Rubiano, Martel and Mínguez2008), Tahir et al. (Reference Tahir, Weick, Shutov, Kim, Matveichev, Ostrik, Sultanov, Lomonosov, Piriz, Cela and Hoffmann2008), Zvorykin et al. (Reference Zvorykin, Berthe, Boustie, Levchenko and Ustinovskii2008), Lomonosov (Reference Lomonosov2007), Torrisi et al. (Reference Torrisi, Margarone, Gammino and Ando2007), and Varro (Reference Varro2007).
Early in August 2008, the Heavy Ion Fusion Symposium took place in Tokyo to discuss the progress of inertial fusion in general, with emphasis on the role of heavy ion drivers, beam physics, target design, fusion chambers, dense plasmas, lasers and their interactions with matter, and inertial fusion power systems. The status of inertial fusion programs in general and especially the programs related to particle beam drivers in Japan, USA, and Europe were discussed (Johzaki et al., Reference Johzaki, Sakagami, Nagatomo and Mima2007; Kawamura et al., Reference Kawamura, Horioka and Koike2006; Nakamura et al., Reference Nakamura, Sakagami, Johzaki, Nagatomo and Mima2006; Sasaki et al., Reference Sasaki, Yano, Nakajima, Kawamura and Horioka2006; Someya et al., Reference Someya, Miyazawa, Kikuchi and Kawata2006). This symposium clearly stimulated further progress toward inertial fusion energy production using intense ion beams and basic understanding of associated science and technologies. Heavy-ion accelerators are promising candidate drivers for energy production due to their high repetition rate and efficiency. The most powerful heavy ion beam facility currently is operated by the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt. The development there in accelerator and target technology has been reported frequently also in our journal (Funk et al., Reference Funk, Bock, Dornik, Geissel, Stetter, Stowe, Tahir and Hoffmann1998; Meyertervehn et al., Reference Meyertervehn, Witkowski, Bock, Hoffmann, Hofmann, Muller, Arnold and Mulser1990; Ulrich et al., Reference Ulrich, Korner, Krotz, Ribitzki, Murnick, Matthias, Kienle and Hoffmann1987; Hoffmann et al., Reference Hoffmann, Blazevic, Ni, Rosmej, Roth, Tahir, Tauschwitz, Udrea, Varentsov, Weyrich and Maron2005; Tahir et al., Reference Tahir, Spiller, Shutov, Lomonosov, Gryaznov, Piriz, Wouchuk, Deutsch, Fortov, Hoffmann and Schmidt2007; Temporal et al., Reference Temporal, Lopez-Cela, Piriz, Grandjouan, Tahir and Hoffmann2005), and will certainly have an impact on the development of ion drivers for fusion energy. Currently, the attention of the scientific community in our field is focused on the progress of laser fusion. An important conference in this field, the XXX ECLIM (European Conference on Laser Interaction with Matter), was held in August 2008 in Darmstadt. Laser and Particle Beams was a sponsor of this conference and we did encourage participants of the ECLIM to submit their research results as research papers to the journal. Many participants of ECLIM are readers or authors of Laser and Particle Beams and reported about new results of their continued research projects. Earlier results of these projects had in some cases already been reported in our journal (Abdallah et al., Reference Abdallah, Batani, Desai, Lucchini, Faenov, Pikuz, Magunov and Narayanan2007; Badziak et al., Reference Badziak, Glowacz, Hora, Jablonski and Wolowski2006; Baeva et al., Reference Baeva, Gordienko and Pukhov2007; Nobile et al., Reference Nobile, Nikroo, Cook, Cooley, Alexander, Hackenberg, Necker, Dickerson, Kilkenny, Bernat, Chen, Xu, Stephens, Huang, Haan, Forsman, Atherton, Letts, Bono and Wilson2006).