Foreword to Special Issue: Papers from the 55th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, November 11–14, 2013, Denver, Colorado, USA Available to Purchase

The program of the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP) consisted of ninety-six invited papers, three invited post-deadline papers, four invited tutorial papers, four mini-conferences, three invited review papers, thirty-five contributed oral papers, forty-seven contributed poster sessions, and a Maxwell Prize address. The conference began on Monday morning, November 11, with a twenty-year review of research on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak. Tuesday morning started with a review of unwanted effects in inertial-confinement fusion produced by the interaction between an intense laser beam and plasma and the mitigation of such effects. High-intensity laser propagation and interactions were the subject of the Thursday morning Maxwell Prize address. Friday morning started with a review of the physics principles, benefits, and drawbacks of edge-localized modes (ELMs) in tokamak plasmas. Afternoon tutorial lectures were delivered on modeling plasma-sheath profiles with computer simulations; on developing validated models, utilizing synthetic diagnostics,...