Proceedings of the third meeting for A3 foresight program workshop on critical physics issues specific to steady state sustainment of high-performance plasmas

To enhance close collaborations among scientists in three Asian countries (China, Japan and Korea), A3 foresight program on Plasma Physics was newly started from August 2012 under the auspice of JSPS (Japan), NRF (Korea) and NSFC (China). The main purpose of this project is to solve several key physics issues through joint experiments on three Asian advanced fully superconducting fusion devices (EAST in China, LHD in Japan and KSTAR in Korea) and other magnetic confinement devices to carry out multi-faceted and complementary physics researches. To summarize the progress and achievement in the first academic year under this A3 foresight program, this workshop was hosted by Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and held in Beijing during 19-24 May, 2013. Collaborated research and communication with other A3 programs and bilateral programs, as well as participation of young scientists were encouraged in this workshop. The topics include steady state sustainment of magnetic configurations, edge and divertor plasma control and confinement of alpha particles. This issue is the collection of 40 papers presented at the entitled meeting. All the 40 of the presented papers are indexed individually. (J.P.N.)