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

The 15th International Conference Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM) took place at the Veksler and Baldin Laboratory of High Energy Physics (VBLHEP) of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna in the period July 6 -11, with a record participation of 244 people from 31 countries! The previous meeting of the series in Birmingham 2013 had collected 158 physicists from 25 countries [J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 509, 011001 (2014)]. At SQM-2015, there was also a record participation of young scientist; every 4th conference attendee did not yet hold a PhD degree! There was a special program of 4 general lectures, a devoted session of parallel talks for Young Talents and the Helmholtz International Summer School (HISS) with 16 lecturers on the topics regarding Dense Matter (29.06.-11.07.) as a satellite event at the Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics (BLTP) and at VBLHEP. Another satellite event was the Round TableWorkshop on Physics at NICA, jointly organized by JINR and the Republic of South Africa on July 5, 2015.

The selection of Dubna as the place for SQM-2015 conference by the International Advisory Committee (IAC) demonstrates the broad interest of the community in the progress of the Russian Megascience Project on the Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility (NICA) hosted at JINR Dubna. In a few years from now the experiments planned at NICA will produce data that provide new information of unprecedented accuracy which will help to answer some of the key questions which are topical at this conference.

The SQM-2015 conference had an ambitious scientific program with 38 plenary talks, 97 parallel talks in 7 topical directions and 39 posters reporting the state of the research and the future 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 are represented in these Proceedings which we recommend to the community!

We gratefully acknowledge support from the JINR Dubna, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung via the Heisenberg-Landau program, 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 the Helmholtz Institutes in Mainz and Jena via the HISS programme. We thank the IAC for their help and advice in planning the conference, and we are grateful to the members of the Local Organisation 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 in preparing these Proceedings.