Foreword to Special Issue: Papers from the 56th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, October 27–31, 2014, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

The 56th annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) brought together students, faculty, and scientists from all subfields of plasma physics. A total of 1678 abstracts were accepted. The scientific program included 102 invited presentations, 5 review presentations, 4 tutorial presentations, 566 contributed presentations, and 1001 poster presentations. The meeting was well attended and went according to plan. The meeting began on Monday morning, October 27, with a review of the ignition effort in inertial confinement fusion by Dr. M. Rosen of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Rosen described how, in 2014, the National Ignition Facility achieved for the first time a fuel energy gain above unity where the fusion energy produced in a laser-driven implosion exceeds the input energy reaching the thermonuclear fuel. This is considered an important scientific milestone in the pursuit of controlled thermonuclear fusion. On Tuesday, Dr. M. Ono of the Princeton...