We discuss several new developments in the field of strange and heavy flavor physics in high energy heavy ion collisions. As shown by many recent theoretical works, heavy flavored particles give us a unique opportunity to study the properties of syst
ems created in these collisions. Two in particular important aspects, the production of (multi) strange hypernuclei and the properties of heavy flavor mesons, are at the core of several future facilities and will be discussed in detail.
We evaluate heavy-quark (HQ) transport properties in a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) employing interaction potentials extracted from thermal lattice QCD. Within a Brueckner many-body scheme we calculate in-medium T-matrices for charm- and bottom-quark sca
ttering off light quarks in the QGP. The interactions are dominated by attractive meson and diquark channels which support bound and resonance states up to temperatures of ~1.5 T_c. We apply pertinent drag and diffusion coefficients (supplemented by perturbative scattering off gluons) in Langevin simulations in an expanding fireball to compute HQ spectra and elliptic flow in sqrt{s_{NN}}=200 GeV Au-Au collisions. We find good agreement with semileptonic electron-decay spectra which supports our nonperturbative computation of the HQ diffusion coefficient, suggestive for a strongly coupled QGP.
