During the past decade, research teams around the world have developed astrophysics-relevant research utilizing high energy-density facilities such as intense lasers and z-pinches. Every two years, at the International conference on High Energy Density Laboratory Astrophysics, scientists interested in this emerging field discuss the progress in topics covering:

- Stellar evolution, stellar envelopes, opacities, radiation transport
- Planetary Interiors, high-pressure EOS, dense plasma atomic physics
- Supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, exploding systems, strong shocks, turbulent mixing
- Supernova remnants, shock processing, radiative shocks
- Astrophysical jets, high-Mach-number flows, magnetized radiative jets, magnetic reconnection
- Compact object accretion disks, x-ray photoionized plasmas
- Ultrastrong fields, particle acceleration, collisionless shocks.

These proceedings cover many of the invited and contributed papers presented at the 6th International Conference on High Energy Density Laboratory Astrophysics, which was held on March 11-14, 2006 at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA.