Guest Editorial Special Issue on High-Current Discharge Plasmas

An intention to organize this Special Issue was born at the International Congress on Energy Fluxes and Radiation Effects (EFRE), which is held every two years in Tomsk under the technical sponsorship of the IEEE. The Congress brings together four conferences, namely, the Symposium on High Current Electronics (SHCE), the Conference on Modification of Materials With Particle Beams and Plasma Flows (CMM), the Conference on Radiation Physics and Chemistry of Condensed Matter (RPC), and the Conference on New Materials and High Technologies (NMHT). Conferences have joined the Congress in different years, but the oldest one is SHCE, which was organized for the first time in 1973, four years before the establishment of the Institute of High Current Electronics (IHCE) in Tomsk. The Symposium on High Current Electronics anticipated the name of the Institute for High Current Electronics due to the fact that the scientific direction of the Institute was laid in the late 60s–early 70s of the last century by the scientific team headed by Prof. Gennady Mesyets, who organized IHCE, SHCE, and subsequently EFRE. The Congress covers a wide range of problems, from pulse power to nanoelectronics, but the unifying canvas is the high-energy impact on materials and environments. In 2020, EFRE Proceedings have published 302 conference papers that the reader can find in the IEEE Xplore digital library. This is why this Special Issue was not intended to publish extended versions of the four-page Congress papers. This special issue was open to the publication of articles by authors regardless of their participation in the EFRE community. The idea of the Special Issue was to collect and analyze the scientific and engineering interests of the community related to the plasma of high-current electric discharges.