You are just holding the first issue in 2008 of our journal Laser and Particle Beams in your hand. We can look back to a quite successful year 2007, where we have published 71 research articles and one review articles. This is practically the same amount of publications as in previous years and the topics ranged from inertial fusion to fundamental problems of beam interaction with matter including also pulse power, high energy density physics and warm dense matter. Especially the field of Warm Dense Matter seems to enjoy an increasing interest and has been addressed by several authors in our journal (Cao et al., Reference Cao, Uschmann, Zamponi, Kampfer, Fuhrmann, Forster, Holl, Redmer, Toleikis, Tschentscher and Glenzer2007; Sasaki et al., Reference Sasaki, Yano, Nakajima, Kawamura and Horioka2006; Deutsch & Popoff, Reference Deutsch and Popoff2006). This journal will make an effort to cover the development of this interesting new field in great detail.
The major part of publications submitted to Laser and Particle Beams addressed interaction phenomena of intense laser or particle beams with ionized matter (Laska et al., Reference Laska, Badziak, Gammino, Jungwirth, Kasperczuk, Krasa, Krousky, Kubes, Parys, Pfeifer, Pisarczyk, Rohlena, Rosinski, Ryc, Skala, Torrisi, Ullschmied, Velyhan and Wolowsk2007; Földes, Reference Foldes2007; Gupta et al., Reference Gupta, Sharma and Mahmoud2007; Borghesi et al., Reference Borghesi, Kar, Romagnani, Toncian, Antici, Audebert, Brambrink, Ceccherini, Cecchetti, Fuchs, Galimberti, Gizzi, Grismayer, Lyseikina, Jung, Macchi, Mora, Osterholtz, Schiavi and Willi2007; Beilis, Reference Beilis2007), diagnostic methods (Faenov et al., Reference Faenov, Magunov, Pikuz, Skobelev, Gasilov, Stagira, Calegari, Nisoli, De Silvestri, Poletto, Villoresi and Andreev2007; Nardi et al., Reference Nardi, Maron and Hoffmann2007), and the phenomenon of accelerated particle beams in intense laser fields (Flippo et al., Reference Flippo, Hegelich, Albright, Yin, Gautier, Letzring, Schollmeier, Schreiber, Schulze and Fernandez2007; Shij, Reference Shi2007; Karmarkar, Reference Karmakar and Pukhov2007; Nickles, Reference Nickles, Ter-Avetisyan, Schnuerer, Sokollik, Sandner, Schreiber, Hilscher, Jahnke, Andreev and Tikhonchuk2007). In 2008, the XXX ECLIM conference will be held in September in Darmstadt. Laser and Particle Beams will offer to publish exciting scientific results that will be presented there, since the main topics of the conference e.g., Equation of State, Inertial Fusion Energy, Fast Ignition, Laser Acceleration, Laser and Ion Beam Interaction with Matter constitute the major part of the research fields covered by this journal.
It is very encouraging to see the impact factor for Laser and Particle Beams rising steadily. This year we may expect the impact factor to rise again from 3.9 to about 4.4. Thus Laser and Particle Beams has the highest impact factor of all journals in the applied physics dealing with plasma physics issues. Among the Essential Science IndicatorsSM there is a section called highly cited papers. These are papers published within the last 10 year period which are significantly more often cited than the average. Here I find it worthwhile to mention that this prestigious category holds a number of publications from Laser and Particle Beams. The list contains highly cited papers in 2007(Gupta & Suk, Reference Gupta and Suk2007; Flippo et al., Reference Flippo, Hegelich, Albright, Yin, Gautier, Letzring, Schollmeier, Schreiber, Schulze and Fernandez2007), in 2006 (Yin et al., Reference Yin, Albright, Hegelich and Fernandez2006; Lifschitz et al., Reference Lifschitz, Faure, Glinec, Malka and Mora2006), in 2005 (Schaumann et al., Reference Schaumann, Schollmeier, Rodriguez-Prieto, Blazevic, Brambrink, Geissel, Korostiy, Pirzadeh, Roth, Rosmej, Faenov, Pikuz, Tsigutkin, Maron, Tahir and Hoffmann2005; Neumayer et al. Reference Neumayer, Bock, Borneis, Brambrink, Brand, Caird, Campbell, Gaul, Goette, Haefner, Hahn, Heuck, Hoffmann, Javorkova, Kluge, Kuehl, Kunzer, Merz, Onkels, Perry, Reemts, Roth, Samek, Schaumann, Schrader, Seelig, Tauschwitz, Thiel, Ursescu, Wiewior, Wittrock and Zielbauer2005; Hora, Reference Hora2005; Badziak et al., Reference Badziak, Glowacz, Jablonski, Parys, Wolowski and Hora2005; Roth et al., Reference Roth, Brambrink, Audebert, Blazevic, Clarke, Cobble, Cowan, Fernandez, Fuchs, Geissel, Habs, Hegelich, Karsch, Ledingham, Neely, Ruhl, Schlegel and Schreiber2005; Hoffmann et al., Reference Hoffmann, Blazevic, Ni, Rosmej, Roth, Tahir, Tauschwitz, Udrea, Varentsov, Weyrich and Maron2005), and also one already from 2004 (Hora, Reference Hora2004). We take this as an indication of the high quality of papers submitted and published in this journal.
In the years to come, we want to offer our authors a new options. One of these innovations, I like to call the pioneer section. Since it may be very interesting for the younger generation of researchers to trace down the roots of our field, I want to offer authors the possibility to introduce us to the early development of our field. The paper by Winterberg (Reference Winterberg2008) is an example of this. Previously classified material is published and related to new ideas and the current development. At the XXIX ECLIM conference in Madrid there was a special pioneers section and this had drawn a lot of attention. Another novelty to Laser and particle Beams will be an invited experts review section where several expert authors will be invited to review the progress of their field of expertise and write a common paper where each author is responsible for his or her respective chapter. I hope that these new options will add to the quality and reputation of the journal.