At March 5 and 6, 2013, the small town of Lunteren in the Netherlands was the scene of the Symposium on Plasma Physics and Radiation Technology for the 25th time. Around 110 participants - mostly Dutch students, PhD-students and supervisors - joined the talks about current plasma research, clustered in focus sessions on Numerical Modeling, Diagnostics, Extreme Plasmas and Applications.

All four focus sessions started with a keynote speech and three orals. Two sessions of in total 52 poster presentations covered an even broader range of topics. Prize winning poster was from Dutch student Kevin Verhaegh (“Intense femto second laser pulse interaction with nano-clusters for cluster fusion”). Best oral presentation was given by PhD candidate Wouter Engelen (“High-coherence Electron bunches produced by femtosecond photoionization”), both from Eindhoven University of Technology.

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Dr. Michael Walsh of the ITER team giving a keynote speech on Diagnostics, the “eyes and ears of the ITER experiment”.

ITER Head of the Diagnostics team, Michael Walsh, gave an update of the current state of affairs of the plasma diagnostic development for the future fusion flagship. “ITER is a 15 billion dollar device, so utilizing it well is important. Diagnostics are the eyes and ears of the machine.”

Tony Donné, director Fusion Physics at DIFFER institute and conference chair of the symposium could be satisfied after the symposium. “The oral presentations of our PhD-students had a high level. It was therefore difficult to pick a winner. The same goes for the poster presentations: all of them were of very good quality”.

Donné concluded: “This is an interesting event for young researchers as well as master students. We hope to reach out to students from abroad in the future. Students from all FuseNet members are welcome next year”. The next edition will be held on 11 and 12 March 2014.

• Website of the Symposium series on Plasma Physics and Radiation Technology