EPJ A Highlight - THOR: Driving collaboration in heavy-ion collision research

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Published on 02 June 2021

As an expansive platform for collaboration between different research groups, the THOR COST Action has enabled hundreds of physicists studying the aftermath of high-energy collisions between heavy ions to improve their predictions.

In the universe’s earliest moments, particles existed in an unimaginably hot plasma, whose behaviour was governed by deeply complex webs of interaction between individual particles. Today, researchers can recreate these exotic conditions through high-energy collisions between heavy ions, whose products can tell us much about how hot, strongly-interacting matter behaves. Yet without extensive, highly coordinated collaborations between researchers across many different backgrounds, studies like this simply wouldn’t be possible. This Topical Issue of EPJ A draws together a large collection of papers inspired by the theory of hot matter and relativistic heavy-ion collisions (THOR) European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action. Running between November 2016 and April 2021, THOR has provided a way for over 300 researchers involved in heavy-ion collision analysis to freely exchange their ideas, leading to exciting new advances in the wider field of particle physics.

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EPJ Plus Focus Point on Classical and Quantum Information Geometry

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Published on 25 May 2021

What is information? What can we do with information? How are we supposed to understand information? How does information influence the development of modern Science?

Some, if not all and a thousand more, of these questions come to the mind of almost every modern researcher whose research area is somehow interconnected with Information Theory. However, the answers to these questions are far from being completely unravelled, and some recent theoretical developments seem to suggest that our understanding of the geometrical aspects of Information Theory will play an increasingly important role in the quest for answers.

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EPJD Colloquium: Challenges and opportunities in verification and validation of low temperature plasma simulations and experiments

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Published on 21 May 2021

In the field of plasma physics, simulations are becoming increasingly relied upon to elucidate fundamental plasma phenomena as well as to simulate real-world plasma reactors. This new colloquium published in EPJD provides a description of how one research group (at Sandia National Laboratories) incorporates verification and validation (V&V) processes in their low temperature plasma (LTP) research and development activities.

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