This Special Issue is dedicated to celebrating the 40 years of Laser and Particle Beams (LPB). The idea is to show and follow the evolution of the scientific topics covered by the journal over a period of 40 years. Therefore, we will look at some of the most significant articles that have appeared in LPB, articles that have had a significant impact and marked the story of the scientific community working in inertial fusion, laser and particle beams, physics of laser-produced plasmas, and applications.

We invite authors to describe the evolution of the topic over the past years. They will ideally need to answer the question of whether the topic has evolved smoothly or if there have been significant breakthroughs, whether previous research has kept its validity, and whether predictions about the progression of the were correct. Such submissions will on one side, of course, be 'review papers', but more than that they will try to frame the addressed topic from a historical perspective, discussing how things have changed in the past, and why and how they should/could progress in the future.

This Issue is extremely timely now, not only because of the 40 years of the journal but also because of the recent and extremely important results obtained at the National Ignition Facility (LLNL, California). In August 2021 they generated 1.3 MJ of fusion energy by irradiating a deuterium-tritium target with 1.9 MJ of laser energy. Practically, this is very close to breakeven (i.e. when the fusion energy equals the laser energy) and marks a fundamental step towards the generation of net energy gain by inertial fusion, one of the topics at the center of the scientific community related to Laser and Particle Beams. The coincidence of such an achievement with the 40 years of LPB is a further reason for the interest in publishing the Special Issue.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• High-density compression experiments at ILE, Osaka
• Recent results from the NOVA program at LLNL
• Corpuscular diagnostics for laser-produced plasma as a source of highly ionized ions
• Investigations of ion streams emitted from plasma produced with a high-power picosecond laser
• Vulcan petawatt: Design, operation, and interactions
• Proposed scheme for compact GeV laser plasma accelerator
• Table-top laser-plasma acceleration as an electron radiography source
• Laser-produced protons and their application as a particle probe
• Status of PHELIX laser and first experiments
• Experimental prospects at the Canadian advanced laser light source facility
• Present and future perspectives for high energy density physics with heavy ion and laser beams
• Experience of micro-heterogeneous target fabrication to study near-critical density plasmas
• Time-resolved LIBS experiment for determination of pollutant concentrations in air
• Progress in direct-drive fusion studies for the Laser Mégajoule