15th International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM2015)

Abstract

The 15th International Conference Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM) took place at theVeksler and Baldin Laboratory of High Energy Physics (VBLHEP) of the Joint Institute forNuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna in the period July 6 -11, with a record participation of 244people from 31 countries! The previous meeting of the series in Birmingham 2013 had collected158 physicists from 25 countries [J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 509, 011001 (2014)]. At SQM-2015, therewas also a record participation of young scientist; every 4th conference attendee did not yethold a PhD degree! There was a special program of 4 general lectures, a devoted session ofparallel talks for Young Talents and the Helmholtz International Summer School (HISS) with16 lecturers on the topics regarding Dense Matter (29.06.-11.07.) as a satellite event at theBogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics (BLTP) and at VBLHEP. Another satellite eventwas the Round TableWorkshop on Physics at NICA, jointly organized by JINR and the Republicof South Africa on July 5, 2015.The selection of Dubna as the place for SQM-2015 conference by the International AdvisoryCommittee (IAC) demonstrates the broad interest of the community in the progress of theRussian Megascience Project on the Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility (NICA) hosted atJINR Dubna. In a few years from now the experiments planned at NICA will produce data thatprovide new information of unprecedented accuracy which will help to answer some of the keyquestions which are topical at this conference.The SQM-2015 conference had an ambitious scientific program with 38 plenary talks, 97parallel talks in 7 topical directions and 39 posters reporting the state of the research and thefuture directions in the fields of strangeness, heavy avors and bulk physics, suggested by the IAC to be the subtitle of the conference from 2016 onwards. Most of the contributions arerepresented in these Proceedings which we recommend to the community!We gratefully acknowledge support from the JINR Dubna, the Russian Foundation forBasic Research, the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung via the Heisenberg-Landauprogram, the Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnistwa Wyższego via the Bogoliubov-Infeld program,the LOEWE program via HIC for FAIR, the Helmholtz Association with their centres DESY,FZ Jülich, GSI Darmstadt, HZ Dresden-Rossendorf, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and theHelmholtz Institutes in Mainz and Jena via the HISS programme. We thank the IAC for theirhelp and advice in planning the conference, and we are grateful to the members of the LocalOrganisation Committee for their help in during the conference as well as to Niels-Uwe Bastian,Alexandra Friesen, Mark Alexander Kaltenborn and Irina Pirozhenko for their assistance inpreparing these Proceedings.