Overview of plasma line broadening

We review the basics of line broadening, its relation to fluctuations and disorder, what causes broadening, the memory loss mechanism and the Standard Theory of line broadening developed by H.R. Griem and others from a modern viewpoint. This modern view benefits from many years of progress and includes a coherent theoretical perspective without the need for a conceptually different view of electrons and ions. Both electrons and ions are described in terms of their random fields. This modern and unified view allows, among other things, extending the range of validity of line profile calculations to complex situations. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.