This year’s edition of the Kudowa Summer School took place in the period 9-13 June traditionally in Kudowa Zdrój, Poland. The School was organized by the Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Microfusion, the International Centre for Dense Magnetised Plasmas and COST Action MP1208 “Developing the physics and the scientific community for Inertial Confinement Fusion”. The event was sponsored by Amplitude Technologies.

As the fusion scientific community knows perfectly well, Kudowa Summer School “Towards Fusion Energy” takes place biannually and aims at young scientists (PhD and master students) from different countries and provides courses on various aspects of the fusion energy, plasma experiments and technology.

We had enormous pleasure to welcome around 40 young scientists from all over the world as well as almost 20 distinguished invited speakers who took us up the learning curve on subjects such as a new approach to ignition in ICF, planetology in laboratory using high power lasers, challenges in magnetic confinement fusion and many others. Students who had the best presentations were awarded prizes for their performance. The list of invited lecturers and their topics includes:

J. Ongena: The role of fusion in our future energy supply and first principles of fusion machines

A.J.H. Donné: Challenges in Magnetic Confinement Fusion

J. Pasley: Ignition and burn in inertial confinement fusion

J. Honrubia: Fast ignition of inertial fusion targets: present

M. Rubel: Controlled Fusion Devices

S. Pinches: Physics challenges and status of ITER

L. Torrisi: Ion acceleration from laser-generated plasma: methods, diagnostics and applications

J. Santos: Energy transport of laser-generated relativistic electron beams in dense matter: an experimental approach

H.-J. Kunze: Plasma Diagnostics by Thomson Scattering

D. Batani: Shock Ignition: a new approach to Ignition in ICF

M. Sadowski: Selected methods of electron- and ion- diagnostics in tokamak scrape-off layer

D. Mazon: A practical example of diagnostic design: soft- Xray tomographic system in WEST using GEM detectors

A. Benuzzi-Mounaix: Planetology in laboratory using high power lasers: progress in warm dense matter

P. Kubes: Influence of external magnetic field and admixtures on neutron production in z-pinches

T. Todd: The technical challenges of DEMO

J. Linke: Plasma facing components

J. Linke: Plasma facing materials

F. Belli: Neutron diagnostics in tokamak plasmas: the ITER radial neutron camera

R. Schneider: Plasma modeling for fusion

J. Stockel: H mode studies on the COMPASS tokamak

Science, however, did not dominate the week spent in Kudowa Zdrój. Participants, after lectures, had a chance to visit the Trail of the Vanishing Professions, the Museum of Gold Mine in Złoty Stok and the Middle Age Park of Technology.

We hope that all our guests will remember Polish hospitality and our efforts to foster the international scientific cooperation among young scientists.