The 61st Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) was held on October 21–25, 2019, in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The meeting brought together researchers (undergraduate students through retirees) from all areas of plasma science. The presentations included five invited review talks, 100 invited talks, and four tutorials. There were 1204 contributed poster presentations and 725 contributed oral presentations. Four mini-conferences were held: Nonequilibrium Transport, Interfaces, and Mixing in Plasmas; Turbulence, Reconnection, Shocks, and Particle Acceleration in Collisionless Laboratory, Space and Astrophysical Plasmas; Building the Bridge to Exascale: Applications and Opportunities for Plasma Physics; and The Future of the Field: Dissertation Talks. The last of these was an opportunity for 18 early career scientists to present their dissertation research, a feature that will be mainstreamed in the 2020 program through contributed talks of twice the usual length. Included among the invited talks were two talks by DPP award winners: William H. Fox, recipient of the Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research, Maria Gatu Johnson, recipient of the Katherine Weimer Award for Outstanding Early Career Achievements in Plasma Physics, and Noah Hurst, recipient of the Marshal N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award.
Review talks spanned the range of plasma physics. On Monday, Andrea Garofalo (General Atomics) opened the meeting with a review presentation titled “Integrating Core Burning Plasma Performance with Edge Stability for ITER.” On Tuesday, Daniel Sinars of Sandia National Laboratories presented a review titled “From Astrophysics to Z-Pinches: HED Science with Pulsed Power.” Highlighting the Z experiment, the largest pulsed power facility in the world, Sinars reviewed scientific achievements in magneto-inertial fusion, dynamic materials science, and x-ray driven science. Jason Fleischer (Princeton University) reviewed “Physics and Application of Photonic Plasma,” a new regime found in nonlinear optics when the statistical ensemble of modes can be treated as a photonic plasma. On Thursday, William Matthaeus (University of Delaware) presented his James Clerk Maxwell Prize address titled “Who needs turbulence? A tour of turbulence effects and outstanding questions in space plasmas.” On Friday, the review presentations concluded with Justin C. Kasper of University of Michigan, speaking on “Parker Solar Probe reveals young solar wind in the grip of the Sun's corona” and providing a preview of the first scientific results from the Parker Solar Probe's close encounters with the sun.
The tutorials also covered the field of plasma physics and introduced some new topics to plasma physicists. In Monday's tutorial, Pravesh Patel (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) described progress toward achieving ignition on the National Ignition Facility. On Tuesday, Stefan Karsch (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) introduced the physics of laser-driven electron acceleration. Yitzhak Maron (Weizmann Institute of Science) delivered Wednesday's tutorial titled “Experimental determination of the thermal, turbulent, and rotational ion motion, and magnetic field profiles in imploding plasmas.” and William Heidbrink (University of California, Irvine) presented the final tutorial on the “Mechanisms of Energetic-Particle Transport in Magnetically Confined Plasmas,” a central topic for upcoming burning plasma experiments.
The 61st Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics also served as a community gathering of plasma physicists and as such had a number of meetings at times outside of the times of the technical sessions. The Women in Plasma Physics Luncheon was held on Monday, and later that evening, the Town Hall on Diversity and Inclusion was well attended. Young scientists and students participated in Student Day, a Town Hall on the Concerns of Young Scientists and a special session on Fellowship Opportunities for Graduate Students. On Tuesday evening, conference participants discussed progress with the APS-DPP Community Planning Process that involved the broad community to identifying scientific and technological opportunities in the fields of Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy Science. The Town Meeting on Plasma Physics at the National Science Foundation, chaired by Vyacheslav Lukin of the NSF Division of Physics, was held at Wednesday lunch time. As usual, there was a healthy demand for sub-community and interest group meetings, and meeting overlap was inevitable.
Awards were presented before the banquet dinner this year. These included Noah Hurst (University of California, San Diego) for the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award and William Fox (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) for the Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics. Maria Gatu Johnson (MIT) received the Katherine Weimer Award in recognition of her Outstanding Early Career accomplishments. The 2019 recipients of the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research were Alexander Schekochihin (University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory), Donald Lamb (University of Chicago), Dustin Froula (University of Rochester), Gianluca Gregori (University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory), and Petros Tzeferacos (University of Chicago) for innovative experiments that demonstrate turbulent dynamo in the laboratory, establishing laboratory experiments as a component in the study of turbulent magnetized plasmas and opening a new path to laboratory investigations of other astrophysical processes. This year's recipient for the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics was William Matthaeus (University of Delaware) for pioneering research into the nature of turbulence in space and astrophysical plasmas, which has led to major advances in understanding particle transport, dissipation of turbulent energy, and magnetic reconnection. Banquet attendees were regaled with the Latin/Jazz music by the award winning Tomasito Cruz and his quartet.
The Education and Outreach Subcommittee (Dr. Arturo Dominguez, Chair) organized various events for the Fort Lauderdale general public, K–12 students, teachers, and undergraduates and graduate students within APS-DPP. On Tuesday, 48 middle school and high school science and physics teachers attended the Teachers Day Workshop, where they learned about plasmas and fusion and were given demos and activities to take back to their classrooms. This year Teachers Day featured a new workshop lead by Professor Chris Orban on computational physics. On Tuesday afternoon, 85 undergraduate posters were presented and, in the evening, outstanding poster awards were given to the following undergraduate presenters: P. W. Wimmerling, Yhoshua Wug, Kiera McKay, Marco Andrews Miller, Grant Johnson, and Henrique Johnson. On Thursday and Friday, approximately 750 students from the Fort Lauderdale area attended the Plasma Expo, which had a record 25 booths this year. Building on the success of recent years, the E&O subcommittee organized a graduate fellowship opportunities panel Tuesday evening targeting undergraduate and early graduate attendees. The E&O subcommittee conducted an outreach event targeting local adults interested in science. The event was an outreach talk about magnetic and inertial fusion given by Arturo Dominguez and Tammy Ma. Finally, a Graduate School Fair featuring plasma graduate schools was organized for the first time to advertise to the participating undergraduates. The fair featured 17 graduate institutions with posters staffed by students and scientists.
The 2019 APS/DPP Program Committee developed the program for the 2019 meeting. The group was chaired by Ellen Zweibel (DPP Chair-elect), with ex-officio members, David E. Newman (DPP Chair), Ellen Zweibel (DPP Vice Chair), Hui Chen (DPP Treasurer/Secy), Richard Dendy (EPS Chair), Mitsuru Kikuchi (AAPPS-DPP Chair), and Edward Thomas (Auburn University), who served as a Local Coordinator. Subcommittees represented the various areas in plasma physics. Members of the Program Committee were Boris Breizman, David Bruhwiler, Christine Coverdale, Darren Craig, Bill Daughton, Andris Dimits, Arturo Dominguez, Fatima Ebrahimi, Gennady Fiksel, Kirk Flippo, John Foster, Will Fox, Dustin Froula, Ivo Furno, Gail Glendinning, Richard Groebner, David Hatch, Chris Hegna, Denise Hinkel, Mihaly Horanyi, Hui Li, Hantao Ji, Michael Keidar, Uwe Kortshagen, Chan Joshi, James Leake, Lorin Matthews, Michael Mauel, Julia Mikhailova, David S. Montgomery, Masayuki Ono, Francesca Poli, Hye-Sook Park, Lisa Reusch, Barrett Rogers, Luis Silva, Marc Swisdak, Alexander Thomas, George Tynan, Petros Tzeferacos, Dennis Whyte, and Victoria Winters. The members of this committee did an excellent job of putting together a well-balanced, interesting program.
Many individuals were essential to the success of the meeting, including staff from some of the participating institutions and the APS Meetings Department, Terri Olsen, Donna Greene, Eric Barth, Ebony Adams, Vinaya Sathyasheelappa, and Donald Wise. Lee Warren and the Freeman Team provided the audio-visual support. A special thanks to Saralyn Stewart, DPP Administrator. Saralyn assists in every aspect and maintains the corporate memory.
The review and invited speakers as well as the tutorial presenters were invited to submit papers for publication in a special edition of the Physics of Plasmas. We thank the editors and staff of the Physics of Plasmas, including Michael Mauel, Igor Kaganovich, Jason Myatt, André Melzer, Andrei Smolyakov, Carl Sovinec, Alexandra Giglia, Benita Hammer, and Deborah Doherty, for their efforts in preparing this special issue, which contains more than 40 invited papers across the important topical areas of plasma physics. These include three tutorials: Experimental determination of the Thermal, Turbulent, and Rotational Ion Motion and Magnetic Field Profiles in Imploding Plasmas by Yitzhak Maron (Weizmann Institute of Science Faculty of Physics); Mechanisms of Energetic-Particle Transport in Magnetically Confined Plasmas by W. W. Heidbrink (University of California Irvine); and Hotspot conditions achieved in Inertial Confinement Fusion Experiments on the National Ignition Facility by Pravesh Patel (LLNL). Also included is the important review by Daniel Sinars (Sandia National Laboratories) and co-authors titled “Review of pulsed-power-driven high energy density physics research on Z” and the review from this year's Maxwell Prize recipient, Keith Burrell (General Atomics), titled “Role of Sheared E × B Flow in Self-Organized, Improved Confinement States in Magnetized Plasmas.”
