This special issue of Journal of Computational and Theoretical Transport (JCTT) contains papers authored by participants in the 25th International Conference on Transport Theory (ICTT). The conference was held at the Portola Hotel and Spa in Monterey, California in mid-October, 2017.
The conference had 83 attendees, including 15 graduate students, who gave a total of 75 technical presentations. Sessions were organized on the following topics: radiative transfer, kinetics and plasma physics, reactor physics, Monte Carlo, SN and PN transport, hybrid methods, uncertainty quantification, quantum transport, analytical transport solutions, and computer graphics.
The breadth of topics covered is an illustration of the robust health of the field of theoretical and computational transport. The conference featured a number of talks describing analytic work on several aspects of transport, including the keynote talk given by Frank Graziani of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the historical foundation of the neutron transport equation. Work on transport in plasmas and in the kinetic and quantum regimes was also described on sessions held the first day. Also of note is the continuing importance of numerical work in transport, as measured by the increasing amount of resources devoted to computational efforts in both academia and industry. Several talks describing advances in Monte Carlo and deterministic transport simulations, as well as novel numerical methods, were presented throughout the conference. Both neutron and thermal radiation transport were represented in those sessions. The special session on computer graphics, in addition to providing several intellectually and visually striking demonstrations, illuminated (as it were) the influence of numerical neutron transport techniques on current computer graphics approaches.
A special session was held in honor of the life of Paul Zweifel, who passed away on 12 February 2017. Paul’s influence on the field of transport in general and the International Conference on Transport Theory in particular would be hard to overstate. In 1967 he published Linear Transport Theory with Ken Case, one of the foundational texts of the field. Paul moved to Blacksburg, Virginia in 1968 where he became Professor of Physics at Virginia Tech. In 1969 Paul, along with Chuck Siewert and Bob Erdmann, organized what was then called the Blacksburg Conference. Under Paul’s leadership, the Blacksburg conference evolved into the biannual International Conference on Transport Theory. Paul went on to organize five more iterations of ICTT. In 1971, Paul founded the journal Transport Theory and Statistical Physics. He served as editor of that journal from 1971 to 1983. TTSP was retitled in 2014 to Journal of Computational and Theoretical Transport in recognition of the growing importance of numerical techniques in transport theory. The session honoring Paul featured presentations, discussions and personal reminiscences of Paul by Norm McCormick, Noel Corngold, Chuck Siewert, Bill Martin, Ed Larsen, Imre Pazit, Giovanni Frosali, Lucio Demio, and Barry Ganapol.
We wish to thank the institutions which donated funds to support the special session for Paul: Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M University, The University of Michigan, and Taylor and Francis Group. These generous contributions supported travel for speakers at the session and refreshments for the speakers and attendees.
The website for ICTT-25, http://ictt-2017.llnl.gov/, contains links to the conference schedule and abstracts.
As the organizer and host of ICTT-25, I solicited full papers from those in attendance and I am very pleased that 28 peer-reviewed articles are appearing in two special issues of JCTT. The first issue contains papers on transport theory, while the second covers computational and applied transport.
The 26th International Conference on Transport Theory will be held on September 23–27, 2019. The organizers are Fausto Malvagi and Andrea Zoia, both of Commissariatá l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA). The location will be the Pierre et Marie Curie University (part of the Sorbonne University), in Paris, France.