42nd European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics
The annual conference of the EPS Plasma Physics Division was held at CCB Lisbon from 22-26 June 2015. Hosted by the Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, organised by Bruno Gonçalves and scientifically chaired by Robert Bingham, it attracted 650 participants from 38 countries. The conference reflected the diverse topics that plasma physics is engaged with, ranging from magnetic confinement fusion, beam plasmas and inertial fusion or basic, space and astrophysical plasmas to low temperature and dusty plasmas, industrial plasmas and plasmas in medicine. Two evening sessions were arranged; the first one, on ITER, featured Professor Bernard Bigot, Director General of ITER, as guest speaker, while the second one was devoted to EUROfusion.
During the conference, the 2015 Hannes Alfvén Prize was awarded to Nathaniel Fisch (Princeton University, USA) “for fundamental studies of wave-particle interactions, thereby predicting new plasma phenomena, including ways of driving currents efficiently with radio-frequency waves”. The 2015 EPS Plasma Physics Division PhD Research Awards were also presented to Bruno Albertazzi (LULI, FR), Joaquim Loizu (EPFL, CH) and Michael Rack (Düsseldorf University, DE).
The EPS Division of Plasma Physics and the IUPAP Plasma Physics Commission [C16] took the opportunity of the conference to highlight the importance they grant to education. They co-sponsored actually the EPS2015 Student Poster Prizes awarded to: M. Bailly-Grandvaux (CELIA, FR), N. Bakharev (IOFFE , RU), S. Esponisa (PSFC-MIT, USA) and L. Horvath (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, HU).
Finally, the 11th Itoh Project Prize in Plasma Turbulence was awarded to Bernhard Schmid (U. Stuttgart, DE).
More information on these prizes can be found on the divisional website: http://plasma.ciemat.es/eps/.
