Status of heavy ion inertial fusion in Europe

Summary form only given, as follows. Activities in Europe concentrate at present on the generation of intense heavy ion beams and the interaction of these beams with matter. After the completion of a systems study and some work on fundamental issues like ion stopping in fully ionized dense plasma, two aspects have been found to characterize the directions of future research. The heavy ion synchrotron and cooler ring facility SIS/ESR at GSI is being commissioned and will allow a number of new experiments in the fields of high-intensity beam dynamics, and beam-target interaction. With this facility, beam instabilities at high space charge density can be investigated and dense plasmas can be produced up to temperatures of several tens of electronvolts. New accelerator scenarios based on non-Liouvillean techniques, which allow current multiplication without increasing the phase space volume, are being investigated and may greatly influence the situation of heavy ion drivers