Strange and Heavy Quark Production in Quark Matter

Dear Colleagues,

Strangeness and heavy quarks particles have been key observables in the search and discovery of a deconfined state of strongly interacting matter: the quark–gluon plasma (QGP). Since the beginning of operations of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) programs, heavy ion physics has entered a new energy regime which has delivered many exciting revelations of the properties of high-temperature QCD and the QGP. The large amount of collected data in the past few decades at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), RHIC and LHC allows for a comprehensive study of strangeness and heavy flavor production both as a function of energy and system size. These last few decades have also propelled us to a new frontier of high energy physics in which initial conditions and cold nuclear matter effects are being boldly addressed. Of the many strangeness flagship results over the last years, hierarchical enhancement based on strange quark content was expected and observed in Ion–Ion (A-A) collisions at the SPS, RHIC and the LHC. However these hierarchical enhancement has been also unexpectedly observed in smaller systems such as proton–proton collisions. Many recent small systems results at high energy colliders indicate that while contemporary heavy ion models can reproduce pertinent observables well, other QGP signatures, such as strangeness enhancement,  collective flow to name a few,  are not understood to the same precision.  On the interdisciplinary aspect, Lattice QCD has reconstructed in the past years an equation of state which enforces the conservation of baryon number, strangeness, and electric charge; this would assume strangeness neutrality. Strangeness neutrality would imply larger experiment baryon chemical potentials pointing to a closer relationship between high energy heavy ion collisions and nuclear astrophysics. The next few decades were very exciting and the upcoming years promise to be equally compelling.  Prospective measurements at future facilities around the world combined with new theory developments and strong experimental efforts will bring a better understanding of strangeness production and open heavy-flavor dynamics in heavy-ion collisions.

This Special Issue aims at giving a state of the art review of the underlying processes and experimental observables relevant to strangeness and heavy quarks in QCD matter, from small to large systems. The issue also welcomes papers on topics in state-of-the-art theory and experimental tool-sets which will help us extract strangeness and heavy quark feature-sets and observables more efficiently and with higher precision that previously achieved.

We cordially invite you to submit a paper that addresses this physics phenomena to this Special Issue, “Strange and Heavy Quark Production in Quark Matter”.

Dr. Astrid Morreale
Guest Editor

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• strangeness
• open heavy flavor
• hidden heavy flavor
• hydrodynamics
• saturation
• multiple parton interactions
• nuclear PDF's
• lattice QCD
• collectivity
• quark gluon plasma
• cold nuclear matter
• hot nuclear matter
• small systems
• machine learning
• deep learning