Rendez-Vous In Busan for SQM2022: Long Time, No See!

Abstract

Yes! It was exactly what we have missed for such a long time since Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM) 2019 in Bari. After SQM 2021, hosted by BNL colleagues (chaired by Zhangbu Xu) online-only as a bridge for the pandemic crisis, we finally got together face-to-face in Busan, Korea for SQM 2022 (see Figure 1), the 20th International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter, from 13 to 17 June. Thirty-nine International Advisory Committee members, 15 Regional Organizing Committee members, and 15 Local Organizing Committee members with three staffs worked tirelessly to organize this conference. Hosted by members of the Heavy Ion Meeting and Pusan National University in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and sponsored by seven national and 10 international organizations, 362 participants (134 inperson and 228 online) from 41 countries enjoyed recent experimental and theoretical developments with social programs such as the reception dinner, the public lecture “Dr. Strange,” and the conference banquet. Despite the mild relaxation of pandemic-related restrictions during and before the conference, the LOC could not exclude online participation, even though in-person participation was strongly encouraged. Warming up with the four on-line lectures in theory and experiment for students on Sunday (12 June), nine experimental and six theoretical plenary talks introduced the most updated results on Monday. A total of 107 parallel talks in four topical sessions narrowly but smoothly proceeded on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. The 35 plenary talks, categorized into five specific topics (bulk, light/heavy flavors, resonance, detector, and others) were presented on Wednesday afternoon through Friday morning. Finally, the three extended summary and prospect talks were given by senior experts (Nu Xu, Berndt Müller, and Peter Braun-Munzinger) with active questions and discussions. The poster session was exceptionally held only in on-line booths in the late afternoon on Tuesday. Considering the 54 plenary talks and the 107 parallel contributions, the LOC expects to publish more than 160 proceedings, which is the highest number so far for an SQM Conference. Even though all contributions indicate remarkable progress continuing to be made, some unexpected new insights are being developed. For instance, the core-corona model successfully describes the experimental data from pp collisions in / INEL 0 -percentile and from PbPb collisions in centrality-percentile, respectively, with a gradual change of the ratio between core and corona contributions, which can be converted to the multiplicity of the charged particles. Regarding the anomalous chiral phenomena in the presence of strong magnetic fields, such as the CME and CMW, an integral property of QCD under conditions of chiral symmetry restoration is suggested. The isobar comparison run provided the most stringent test yet for anomalous chiral current fluctuations in heavy ion collisions, despite the existence of different interpretation possibilities argued in open discussions. Quite rich results on new measurements of (anti-)light hyper nuclei productions were reported, with the first observation of Λ 4 H , and an ambitious challenge with advanced silicon detector technology looks quite promising to open a new era of not only rich statistics of data but also precision measurements in future facilities for heavy ion collisions. Besides lots of interesting discussions among the participants in the final sessions on where we are and where to go, some local social events