Abstract
In this special issue, the present status and the prospects of the development of laser driven neutron
sources are reviewed. Compact neutron sources have been widely interested, explored and developed for
accelerator and laser systems. In this chapter, the uniqueness, the merits and the critical issues of laser
driven neutron sources are described in comparison with accelerator driven neutron sources. The
uniqueness is the small system size and the merits are “small size and short pulse of sources”, which are
important for the higher spatial resolution of imaging and high energy resolution in spectroscopy. On the
other hand, the critical issue of laser driven neutron sources is the low neutron flux in comparison with
the accelerator driven neutron sources. In the following chapters, the above merits, critical issues, and
the prospects are described in some details.
