Dear Colleagues, 

The results of nearly three decades of studying relativistic heavy-ion collisions and, in particular, the decade associated with the use of the largest collectors—LHC at CERN and RHIC at BNL—have led to the creation of a new state of matter, the so-called quark degrees of freedom, or the smallest, yet indivisible components of matter. However, the results obtained so far concern conditions for high temperature and low baryon density values, when the proportions of baryons and anti-baryons are almost identical. With smaller collision energies of elementary particles and heavy ions, it is possible to explore the properties of matter with a lower temperature and higher baryon density values. Today, it is exciting to explore the QCD phase diagram in so far unexplored regions relevant to one of the hottest recent topics related to the phase transition between hadron gas and quark-gluon plasma and the critical point. Understanding the QCD phase diagram is one of the most important goals of relativistic heavy-ion physics. Several methods have been proposed to study the first-order phase transition between the hadron gas and quark-gluon plasma and/or find a possible location of the critical point; one of them is particle correlations and fluctuations. 

Prof. Dr. Hanna Paulina Zbroszczyk
Guest Editor

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• heavy ions
• quantum chromodynamics
• femtoscopy
• fluctuations
• quark gluon plasma