At this Conference organized by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the European Physical Society, and attended by more than 400 participants, approximately 200 talks were presented, including 21 invited papers. These papers were approximately equally divided into experimental and theoretical contributions although the invited papers mostly concerned experimental work. As was to be expected from the present trends in funding and interest, the Conference proceedings were dominated by reports on tokamak research, a topic which concerned more than half of the invited talks and approximately 30% of the contributed papers. In contrast, the representation of other, normally strong areas of research, as laser fusion, high-β plasmas, and stellarators was significantly reduced owing to topical conferences in these fields which were held at about the same time, and because some major machines are still in the construction stage. The Conference included new results on TFR which tend to explain the confinement-time limitations observed in that machine, extensive new work on internal and macroscopic disruptions in tokamaks and an order-of-magnitude advance in plasma confinement time observed in the 2XIIB mirror machine at Livermore.
37th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics