Abstract
This special issue was dedicated to the experimental and numerical researches of the discharge phenomena induced by a high-energy laser and millimeter-wave beam. Regarding the laser supported detonation phenomena, although there was no quantitative agreement between the one-dimensional analyses and the measurements, the experiments clearly showed a unique correlation between the local laser intensity and the local discharge propagation velocity, suggesting the influence of the twodimensionality of laser intensity distribution. As for the millimeter-wave discharges, it was concluded that the rapid evolution of the discharge wave-front and the spatially non-uniformly generated plasma structure form a pair and conserve thermodynamic quantities. For both types of discharges, measurement techniques and physical models have been studied and improved to the level where the spatial distribution of electron temperature, plasma density, etc. can be compared in detail.
