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.
The sign change of the slope of the directed flow of baryons has been predicted as a signal for a first order phase transition within fluid dynamical calculations. Recently, the directed flow of identified particles has been measured by the STAR coll
aboration in the beam energy scan (BES) program. In this article, we examine the collision energy dependence of directed flow $v_1$ in fluid dynamical model descriptions of heavy ion collisions for $sqrt{s_{NN}}=3-20$ GeV. The first step is to reproduce the existing predictions within pure fluid dynamical calculations. As a second step we investigate the influence of the order of the phase transition on the anisotropic flow within a state-of-the-art hybrid approach that describes other global observables reasonably well. We find that, in the hybrid approach, there seems to be no sensitivity of the directed flow on the equation of state and in particular on the existence of a first order phase transition. In addition, we explore more subtle sensitivities like e.g. the Cooper-Frye transition criterion and discuss how momentum conservation and the definition of the event plane affects the results. At this point, none of our calculations matches qualitatively the behavior of the STAR data, the values of the slopes are always larger than in the data.
We study the production of (hyper-)nuclei and di-baryons in most central heavy Ion collisions at energies of $E_{lab}=1-160 A$ GeV. In particular we are interested in clusters produced from the hot and dense fireball. The formation rate of strange an
d non-strange clusters is estimated by assuming thermal production from the intermediate phase of the UrQMD-hydro hybrid model and alternatively by the coalescence mechanism from a hadronic cascade model. Both model types are compared in detail. For most energies we find that both approaches agree in their predictions for the yields of the clusters. Only for very low beam energies, and for di-baryons including $Xi$s, we observe considerable differences. We also study the production of anti-matter clusters up to top RHIC energies and show that the observation of anti-$^4He$ and even anti-$^4_{Lambda}He$ is feasible. We have found a considerable qualitative difference in the energy dependence of the strangeness population factor $R_H$ when comparing the thermal production with the coalescence results.
Two major aspects of strange particle physics at the upcoming FAIR and NICA facilities and the RHIC low energy scan will be discussed. A new distinct production mechanism for hypernuclei will be presented, namely the production abundances for hypernu
clei from $Lambda$s absorbed in the spectator matter in peripheral heavy ion collisions. As strangeness is not uniformly distributed in the fireball of a heavy ion collision, the properties of the equation of state therefore depend on the local strangeness fraction. The same, inside neutron stars strangeness is not conserved and lattice studies on the properties of finite density QCD usually rely on an expansion of thermodynamic quantities at zero strange chemical potential, hence at non-zero strange-densities. We will therefore discuss recent investigations on the EoS of strange-QCD and present results from an effective EoS of QCD that includes the correct asymptotic degrees of freedom and a deconfinement and chiral phase transition.
