The 65th annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) was held from October 30 through November 3, 2023, in Denver, Colorado, at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel. Approximately 2100 physicists attended in person, and just over 160 more were able to attend remotely and view the Virtual Poster Session. With its large attendance, our Annual Meeting was filled with lively discussions and important presentations of the most exciting developments in the modern observation, theory, simulation, and manipulation of plasma. The presentations included four invited review talks, 99 invited talks, seven talks for a special NIF invited session, four tutorials, and four presentations from this year's prize and award recipients. There were 1235 contributed poster presentations and 859 contributed oral presentations. In keeping with APS guidance for hybrid meetings, in-person presentations of all invited presentations were broadcast live and were accompanied by a Q&A discussion. All contributed oral were live-streamed and poster presentations were pre-recorded along with options to schedule in-person discussions on demand. Six mini-conferences were held: “Eliminating barriers to entry for plasma physics,” “Recent advances in magnetized turbulence in heliophysical, astrophysical, and laboratory plasmas,” “The Stellarator Path to an FPP – a Public and Private Endeavor,” “Collisionless and Weakly Collisional Shocks in Laboratory and Space Plasmas,” “Interrelationship between experiments in Laboratory and Space Plasmas (ELASP).”
A new addition to the 2023 meeting was the welcome event and the Virtual Poster Session on the Thursday before the in-person meeting days. This was followed on Sunday afternoon with the very popular “Student Day,” where students could learn from other students how best to navigate the Annual Meeting, connect with other students, and share successful ways to connect with colleagues and advance their professional careers.
Finally, the 2023 meeting featured the addition of new sorting sub-categories for machine learning and data science techniques in plasma science. This new topic already attracted over 55 submissions across all fields and appears to be a well-received topical area for the meeting.
Review talks spanned the range of plasma physics and highlighted milestone achievements. On Monday, John Mather, Senior Astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, opened the meeting with a review presentation titled “The James Webb Space Telescope Mission.” Mather presented stunning images of galaxies, active galactic nuclei, star-forming regions, and planets and discussed the hunt for the first objects that formed after the Big Bang, the first black holes, new observations of galaxy growth, planetary systems, and individual exoplanets. On Tuesday, John Rice (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) presented a review titled “Driven Rotation, Self-Generated Flow and Momentum Transport in Tokamak Plasmas.” Plasma rotation has a profound impact on plasma turbulence, transport, and stability in tokamak plasmas, and the physics of rotation is governed by a balance between external torques, intrinsic rotation, and the momentum flux gradient. Because these effects change with different regimes of operation, great progress has been made in understanding and modeling the many “curious” rotation phenomena seen experimentally. Paul Cassak (West Virginia University) delivered a presentation titled “A Review of Recent Progress on Energy Conversion in Plasmas Beyond Fluid Models,” where he described the kinetic theory of plasma not in local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE). Non-perturbative approaches are needed in plasmas out of LTE, and Cassak emphasized the importance of phase space density, rather than fluid moments, to describe both kinetic simulations and satellite and/or laboratory measurements. On Thursday, Thomas Antonsen, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, presented his James Clerk Maxwell Prize address titled “Adjoint Methods in Plasma Physics and Charged Particle Dynamics.” Antonsen reviewed some problems from the areas of plasma physics and charged particle dynamics where adjoint methods have proven useful or possibly can be applied, including the timely topics of current-drive efficiency, three-dimensional (3D) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) stellarator equilibria, and the sensitivity of accelerators, particle sources, and beam-driven microwave sources to subtle changes in geometric structures. On Friday, the review presentations concluded with Richard Groebner's (General Atomics) review of “Progress in Understanding H-mode Pedestal Structure.” Understanding the plasma physics governing the H-mode pedestal, the narrow region of high-pressure gradient at the edge of magnetically confined plasmas, is a major achievement. An over-arching result is that magnetohydrodynamic instabilities, peeling-ballooning modes, and kinetic ballooning modes set a hard limit to the achievable pedestal pressure in fusion plasma confined by tokamaks.
The tutorials also covered the field of plasma physics and introduced some new topics and technologies to plasma physicists that connect to our research. Monday's tutorial, by Pierre Michel (Lawrence Livermore Natl Lab) presented an “Introduction to laser-plasma interactions,” based in part on his new textbook Introduction to Laser-Plasma Interactions (published by Springer). On Tuesday, Tom Looby (Commonwealth Fusion Systems) presented “SPARC power exhaust workflows using open source tools for plasma facing component design and operational scenario planning,” where he guided the audience through a series of physics-to-engineering workflows that were used to finalize the SPARC tungsten Plasma Facing Component (PFC) design. Chris Hamilton (Institute for Advanced Study) delivered Wednesday's tutorial “Kinetic Theory of Stellar Systems, or, Dynamics in Translation: How the Mathematics of Nuclear Fusion Informs the Physics of Galaxies.” Hamilton provided the audience with a lexicon relevant to both stellar systems and plasma kinetics and described the mathematical overlap, for example, as Landau damping underpins angular momentum transport in galactic disks. The final tutorial was delivered by Scott E. Kruger (Tech-X Corp) titled “Thinking Bayesian for Plasma Physicists,” and introduces key concepts to this powerful tool for making inferences about the physical world based on data including uncertainty quantification, incorporation of prior knowledge, and robustness to ill-posed problems.
In addition to scholarly research presentations, the meeting had opportunities to enhance the life of our community. In addition to Sunday's “Student Day” and Monday's mini-conference “Eliminating barriers to entry for plasma physics,” the meeting hosted the Women in Plasma Physics Reception, the University Fusion Association General Meeting, public engagement networking sessions, several special receptions for students, and much appreciated coffee breaks. The ITER Town Hall presented the status of the large international burning plasma facility under construction in France. Kathryn Svinarich (Kettering University) moderated a lunch-time discussion titled “Creating Thriving Physics Programs: Effective Practices for Physics (EP3) Office Hours for Faculty,” and Tremaine Brittian (American Physical Society) described the new APS Innovation Unit and explained how to leverage innovation strategies to create social change in the physics community.
Awards were presented, as we celebrated the achievements of the award recipients, during DPP's Annual banquet dinner. The APS Awards included Ian Ochs (who graduated from Princeton University under the supervision of Professor Nat Fisch) for the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award and Dr. David Turnbull (University of Rochester) for the Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics. The 2023 recipients of the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research were Eric Sonnendrücker (Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics), Hong Qin (Princeton Plasma Physics Lab), and Philip Morrison (University of Texas at Austin) for establishing and shaping the field of structure-preserving geometric algorithms for plasma physics. This year's recipient for the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics was Distinguished University Professor Thomas Antonsen (University of Maryland) for pioneering contributions in the theory of magnetized plasma stability, RF current drive, laser–plasma interactions, and charged particle beam dynamics. The 2023 recipient of the Ronald C. Davidson Award, presented in cooperation with the APS-DPP by the American Institute of Physics Publishing, was Debra Callahan (formerly from LLNL and now Senior Scientist – Focused Energy Inc.) for developing her empirical model, now known as the “Debbie P2-model” as a tool for the key design parameters needed to optimize NIF implosion symmetry.
The 2023 APS/DPP Program Committee developed the program for the 65th APS-DPP Annual Meeting. The group was chaired by Edward Thomas (Chair Elect), Tobin Munsat (Local Co-ordinator), Karl Krushelnick (Chair), Cameron Geddes (Vice Chair), Sophia Gershman (Secy/Treasurer), Denise Hinkel (Past Chair), Kristel Crombé (representing EPS), Abhijit Sen (representing AAPPS-DPP), Bill Amatucci, James Caplinger, Cgrus Crabtree, Taylor Hall, Vijay Harid, Vadim Roytershteyn, Derek Thuecks, Steve Vincena, Franklin Dollar, Jennifer Elle, Frederico Fiuza, Mathias Fuchs, Julia Mikhailova, Emma Snively, Sean Finnegan, Radha Bahukutumbi, Debra Callahan, Dan Casey, Jeff Fein, Michael Rosenberg, Ann Satsangi, David Schlossberg, Patrick Knapp, Maylis Dozieres, Heather Johns, Sander Lavine, Mike MacDonald, Ben Ofori-Okai, Jessica Shang, Mitchell Walker II, Kentaro Hara, Magnus Haw, Surabhi Jaiswal, Kristina Lemmer, Justin Little, Sedina Tsikata, Theresa Wilks, Kshitish Barada, Devon Battaglia, Grant Bodner, Tommaso Bolzonella, Stephanie Diem, Valerie Izzo, Manjit Kaur, Florian Laggner, Greg Sinclair, Robert Wilcox, Felix Parra-Diaz, Tess Bernard, Diego del-Castillo-Negrete, Tünde Fülöp, Luca Guazzotto, Abhay Ram, Li-Jen Chen, Kristopher Klein, Jason Shuster, Marco Velli, Jongsoo Yoo, and Arturo Dominguez. The members of this committee did an excellent job of putting together an exciting and well-balanced program.
Many individuals were essential to the success of the meeting, including staff from some of the participating institutions and the APS Meetings Department, Ebony Adams, Alexandria Cannon, Andre Cholewinski, Hunter Clemens, Jim Egan, Donna Greene, Terri Olsen, Ligette Rogers, and Vinaya Sathyasheelappa. Cynthia Smith, Lee Warren, and the Freeman Team provided the audio-visual support. A very 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 Physics of Plasmas, including Michael Mauel, Igor Kaganovich, Jason Myatt, André Melzer, Andrei Smolyakov, Carl Sovinec, Brian Solis, Benita Hammer, and Deborah Doherty, for their efforts in preparing this special issue, which contains over 40 invited papers, including four review papers and two tutorials, across the important topical areas of fundamental and applied plasma physics.
