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Forest fires have not been considered as a significant threat for mountain forests of the European Alpine Space so far. Climate change and its effects on nature, ecology, forest stand structure and composition, global changes according to demands of society and general trends in the provision of ecosystem services are potentially going to have a significant effect on fire ignition in the future. This makes the prediction of forest fire ignition essential for forest managers in order to establish an effective fire prevention system and to allocate fire fighting resources effectively, especially in alpine landscapes. This paper presents a modelling approach for predicting human-caused forest fire ignition by a range of socio-economic factors associated with an increasing forest fire danger in Austria. The relationship between touristic activities, infrastructure, agriculture and forestry and the spatial occurrence of forest fires have been studied over a 17-year period between 1993 and 2009 by means of logistic regression. 59 independent socio-economic variables have been analysed with different models and validated with heterogeneous subsets of forest fire records. The variables included in the final model indicate that railroad, forest road and hiking trail density together with agricultural and forestry developments may contribute significantly to fire danger. The final model explains 60.5% of the causes of the fire events in the validation set and allows a solid prediction. Maps showing the fire danger classification allow identifying the most vulnerable forest areas in Austria and are used to predict the fire danger classes on municipality level.

Hot QCD physics studies the nuclear strong force under extreme temperatureand densities. Experimentally these conditions are achieved via high-energycollisions of heavy ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and theLarge Hadron Collider (LHC). In the past decade, a unique and substantial suiteof data was collected at RHIC and the LHC, probing hydrodynamics at the nucleonscale, the temperature dependence of the transport properties of quark-gluonplasma, the phase diagram of nuclear matter, the interaction of quarks andgluons at different scales and much more. This document, as part of the 2023nuclear science long range planning process, was written to review the progressin hot QCD since the 2015 Long Range Plan for Nuclear Science, as well ashighlight the realization of previous recommendations, and presentopportunities for the next decade, building on the accomplishments andinvestments made in theoretical developments and the construction of newdetectors. Furthermore, this document provides additional context to supportthe recommendations voted on at the Joint Hot and Cold QCD Town Hall Meeting,which are reported in a separate document.

We simultaneously incorporate two common extensions of the hadron resonance gas model, namely the addition of extra, unconfirmed resonances to the particle list, and the excluded volume repulsive interactions. We emphasize the complementary nature of these two extensions and identify combinations of conserved charge susceptibilities that allow us to constrain them separately. In particular, ratios of second-order susceptibilities like χ11BQ/χ2B and χ11BS/χ2B are sensitive only to the baryon spectrum, while fourth-to-second order ratios like χ4B/χ2B, χ31BS/χ11BS, or χ31BQ/χ11BQ are mainly determined by repulsive interactions. Analysis of the available lattice results suggests the presence of both the extra states in the baryon-strangeness sector and the repulsive baryonic interaction, with indications that hyperons have a smaller repulsive core than nonstrange baryons. The modified hadron resonance gas model presented here significantly improves the description of lattice QCD susceptibilities at chemical freeze-out and can be used for the analysis of event-by-event fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions.

In this contribution we will discuss two aspects of the matter created in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. First we will attempt to define a universal measure for the fluidity of a substance, which will allow a correct comparison between the fluidity of a Quark Gluon Plasma and any well known substance. Second we will discuss current measurements of particle correlations and their implication for possible local parity violation.

In this note we discuss subtleties associated with the efficiency corrections for measurements of off-diagonal cumulants and factorial moments for a situation when one deals with overlapping sets of particles, such as correlations between numbers of protons and positively charged particles. In particular, we discuss the situation commonly encountered in heavy-ion experiments, where first all charges are reconstructed and then protons are selected from these charges by an additional particle identification procedure. We present the efficiency correction formulas for the case when the detection efficiencies follow a binomial distribution.

We revisit the problem of particlization of a QCD fluid into hadrons and resonances at the end of the fluid dynamical stage in relativistic heavy-ion collisions in a context of fluctuation measurements. The existing methods sample an ideal hadron resonance gas, and therefore, they do not capture the non-Poissonian nature of the grand-canonical fluctuations, expected due to QCD dynamics such as the chiral transition or QCD critical point. We address the issue by partitioning the particlization hypersurface into locally grand-canonical fireballs populating the space-time rapidity axis that are constrained by global conservation laws. The procedure allows to quantify the effect of global conservation laws, volume fluctuations, thermal smearing, and resonance decays on fluctuation measurements in various rapidity acceptances and can be used in fluid dynamical simulations of heavy-ion collisions. As a first application, we study event-by-event fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using an excluded volume hadron resonance gas model matched to lattice QCD susceptibilities, with a focus on (pseudo)rapidity acceptance dependence of net baryon, net proton, and net charge cumulants. We point out large differences between net proton and net baryon cumulant ratios that make direct comparisons between the two unjustified. We observe that the existing experimental data on net-charge fluctuations at the LHC shows a strong suppression relative to a hadronic description.

We study deuteron production using no-coalescence hydrodynamic + transport simulations of central AuAu collisions at sNN=7-200 GeV. Deuterons are sampled thermally at the transition from hydrodynamics to transport and interact in transport dominantly via πpn↔πd reactions. The measured proton, lambda, and deuteron transverse momentum spectra and yields are reproduced well for all collision energies considered. We further provide a possible explanation for the measured minimum in the energy dependence of the coalescence parameter B2(sNN) as well as for the difference between B2(d) for deuterons and that for antideuterons, B2(d¯).

We study deuteron production using no-coalescence hydrodynamic + transport simulations of central AuAu collisions at sNN=7-200 GeV. Deuterons are sampled thermally at the transition from hydrodynamics to transport and interact in transport dominantly via πpn↔πd reactions. The measured proton, lambda, and deuteron transverse momentum spectra and yields are reproduced well for all collision energies considered. We further provide a possible explanation for the measured minimum in the energy dependence of the coalescence parameter B2(sNN) as well as for the difference between B2(d) for deuterons and that for antideuterons, B2(d¯).

We report on recent progress concerning effects of global conservation laws on cumulants of conserved quantities. Specifically, we will relate for an arbitrary equation of state cumulants of a conserved charge measured in a subvolume of a thermal system with the corresponding grandcanonical susceptibilities, taking into account exact global conservation of that charge. Applications to actual measurement at the RHIC and LHC as well as extensions to multiple conserved charges will be discussed.

We report on recent progress concerning the theoretical description of event-by-event fluctuations in heavy-ion collisions. Specifically, we discuss a new Cooper–Frye particlization routine — the subensemble sampler — which is designed to incorporate effects of global conservation laws, thermal smearing and resonance decays on fluctuation measurements in various rapidity acceptances. First applications of the method to heavy-ion collisions at the LHC energies are presented, and further necessary steps to analyze fluctuations from the RHIC beam energy scan are outlined.

Possible observables of baryon number clustering due to the instabilities occurring at a first order QCD phase transition are discussed. The dynamical formation of baryon clusters at a QCD phase transition can be described by numerical fluid dynamics, augmented with a gradient term and an equation of state with a mechanically unstable region. It is shown that the dynamical description of this phase transition, in nuclear collisions, will lead to the formation of dense baryon clusters at the phase boundary. State-of-the-art machine learning methods find that the coordinate space clumping leaves characteristic imprints on the spatial net density distribution in almost every event. On the other hand the momentum distributions do not show any clear event-by-event features. It is shown that the 'third order' cumulant, the skewness, shows a peak at the beam energy where the system, created in the heavy ion collision, reaches the deconfinement phase transition.

The preliminary STAR data for proton cumulants for central collisions at s=7.7GeV component proton multiplicity distribution. We show that this two-component distribution is statistics friendly in that factorial cumulants of surprisingly high orders may be extracted with a relatively small number of events. As a consequence the two-component model can be tested and verified right now with the presently available STAR data from the first phase of the RHIC beam energy scan.

We derive the relation between cumulants of a conserved charge measured in a subvolume of a thermal system and the corresponding grand-canonical susceptibilities, taking into account exact global conservation of that charge. The derivation is presented for an arbitrary equation of state, with the assumption that the subvolume is sufficiently large to be close to the thermodynamic limit. Our framework – the subensemble acceptance method (SAM) – quantifies the effect of global conservation laws and is an important step toward a direct comparison between cumulants of conserved charges measured in central heavy ion collisions and theoretical calculations of grand-canonical susceptibilities, such as lattice QCD. As an example, we apply our formalism to net-baryon fluctuations at vanishing baryon chemical potentials as encountered in collisions at the LHC and RHIC.

This report summarizes the presentations and discussions during the Rapid Reaction Task Force “Dynamics of critical fluctuations: Theory – phenomenology – heavy-ion collisions”, which was organized by the ExtreMe Matter Institute EMMI and held at GSI, Darmstadt, Germany in April 2019. We address the current understanding of the dynamics of critical fluctuations in QCD and their measurement in heavy-ion collision experiments. In addition, we outline what might be learned from studying correlations in other physical systems, such as cold atomic gases.

We analyze the behavior of cumulants of conserved charges in a subvolume of a thermal system with exact global conservation laws by extending a recently developed subensemble acceptance method (SAM) [1] to multiple conserved charges. Explicit expressions for all diagonal and off-diagonal cumulants up to sixth order that relate them to the grand canonical susceptibilities are obtained. The derivation is presented for an arbitrary equation of state with an arbitrary number of different conserved charges. The global conservation effects cancel out in any ratio of two second order cumulants, in any ratio of two third order cumulants, as well as in a ratio of strongly intensive measures Σ and ∆ involving any two conserved charges, making all these quantities particularly suitable for theory-to-experiment comparisons in heavy-ion collisions. We also show that the same cancellation occurs in correlators of a conserved charge, like the electric charge, with any non-conserved quantity such as net proton or net kaon number. The main results of the SAM are illustrated in the framework of the hadron resonance gas model. We also elucidate how net-proton and net-Λ fluctuations are affected by conservation of electric charge and strangeness in addition to baryon number.

Many simulations of relativistic heavy-ion collisions involve the switching from relativistic hydrodynamics to kinetic particle transport. This switching entails the sampling of particles from the distribution of energy, momentum, and conserved currents provided by hydrodynamics. Usually, this sampling ensures the conservation of these quantities only on the average, i.e., the conserved quantities may actually fluctuate among the sampled particle configurations and only their averages over many such configurations agree with their values from hydrodynamics. Here we apply a recently invented method [D. Oliinychenko and V. Koch, Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 182302 (2019)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.123.182302] to ensure conservation laws for each sampled configuration in spatially compact regions (patches) and study their effects: From the well-known (micro-)canonical suppression of means and variances to little studied (micro-)canonical correlations and higher-order fluctuations. Most of these effects are sensitive to the patch size. Many of them do not disappear even in the thermodynamic limit, when the patch size goes to infinity. The developed method is essential for particlization of stochastic hydrodynamics. It is useful for studying the chiral magnetic effect, small systems, and in general for fluctuation and correlation observables.

We review the present status of the search for a phase transition and critical point as well as anomalous transport phenomena in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), with an emphasis on the Beam Energy Scan program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. We present the conceptual framework and discuss the observables deemed most sensitive to a phase transition, QCD critical point, and anomalous transport, focusing on fluctuation and correlation measurements. Selected experimental results for these observables together with those characterizing the global properties of the systems created in heavy ion collisions are presented. We then discuss what can be already learned from the currently available data about the QCD critical point and anomalous transport as well as what additional measurements and theoretical developments are needed in order to discover these phenomena.

Correlations and fluctuations of physical quantities are known to play an important role in phase transitions and critical phenomena. In recent years some experimental attempts were made in the scope of the Beam Energy Scan program to locate a possible critical point in the QCD phase diagram. In this work we use the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model to investigate the off-diagonal quark susceptibility, which is related to the quark–anti-quark scaled correlation at the mean field level. We show that this correlation has a significant peak near the critical point and, therefore, may be a useful quantity to measure in experiment. We further study the effects of a repulsive vector coupling, which reduces the strength of the scaled correlation near the critical point.

The QCD baryon number density can formally be expanded into a Laurent series in fugacity, which is a relativistic generalization of Mayer's cluster expansion. We determine properties of the cluster expansion in a model with a phase transition and a critical point at finite baryon density, in which the Fourier coefficients of the expansion can be determined explicitly and to arbitrary order. The asymptotic behavior of Fourier coefficients changes qualitatively as one traverses the critical temperature and it is connected to the branch points of a thermodynamic potential associated with the phase transition. The results are discussed in the context of lattice QCD simulations at imaginary chemical potential. We argue that the location of a branch point closest to the imaginary chemical potential axis can be extracted through an analysis of an exponential suppression of Fourier coefficients. This is illustrated using the four leading coefficients both in a toy model as well as by using recent lattice QCD data.

The coordinate and momentum space configurations of the net baryon number in heavy ion collisions that undergo spinodal decomposition, due to a first-order phase transition, are investigated using state-of-the-art machine-learning methods. Coordinate space clumping, which appears in the spinodal decomposition, leaves strong characteristic imprints on the spatial net density distribution in nearly every event which can be detected by modern machine learning techniques. On the other hand, the corresponding features in the momentum distributions cannot clearly be detected, by the same machine learning methods, in individual events. Only a small subset of events can be systematically differ- entiated if only the momentum space information is available. This is due to the strong similarity of the two event classes, with and without spinodal decomposition. In such sce- narios, conventional event-averaged observables like the baryon number cumulants signal a spinodal non-equilibrium phase transition. Indeed the third-order cumulant, the skewness, does exhibit a peak at the beam energy (Elab = 3–4 A GeV), where the transient hot and dense system created in the heavy ion collision reaches the first-order phase transition.

We demonstrate that the multiplicity distribution of a system located in the vicinity of a first-order phase transition can be successfully measured in terms of its factorial cumulants with a surprisingly small number of events. This finding has direct implications for the experimental search of a QCD phase transition conjectured to be located in the high baryon density region of the QCD phase diagram.

The deuteron yield in Pb+Pb collisions at sNN=2.76TeV is consistent with thermal production at a freeze out temperature of T=155MeV. The existence of deuterons with binding energy of 2.2 MeV at this temperature was described as "snowballs in hell" [P. Braun-Münzinger, B. Dönigus, and N. Löher, CERN Courier, August 2015]. We provide a microscopic explanation of this phenomenon, utilizing relativistic hydrodynamics and switching to a hadronic afterburner at the above-mentioned temperature of T=155MeV. The measured deuteron pT spectra and coalescence parameter B2(pT) are reproduced without free parameters, only by implementing experimentally known cross sections of deuteron reactions with hadrons, most importantly πd↔πnp.

The longitudinal proton-proton femtoscopy (Hanbury Brown-Twiss) correlation function, based on the idea that in a heavy-ion collision at s20GeV stopped protons are likely to be separated in configuration space, is evaluated. It shows a characteristic oscillation which appears sufficiently pronounced to be accessible in experiment. The proposed measurement is essential for estimating the baryon density in the central rapidity region and can be also viewed as an (almost) direct verification of the Lorentz contraction of the fast-moving nucleus.

The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) will be the accelerator-based flagship research facility in many basic sciences and their applications in Europe for the coming decades. FAIR will open up unprecedented research opportunities in hadron and nuclear physics, in atomic physics and nuclear astrophysics as well as in applied sciences like materials research, plasma physics and radiation biophysics with applications towards novel medical treatments and space science. FAIR is currently under construction as an international facility at the campus of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum for Heavy-Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. While the full science potential of FAIR can only be harvested once the new suite of accelerators and storage rings is completed and operational, some of the experimental detectors and instrumentation are already available and will be used starting in summer 2018 in a dedicated research program at GSI, exploiting also the significantly upgraded GSI accelerator chain. The current manuscript summarizes how FAIR will advance our knowledge in various research fields ranging from a deeper understanding of the fundamental interactions and symmetries in nature to a better understanding of the evolution of the Universe and the objects within.

We determine a net-baryon multiplicity distribution which reproduces all cumulants measured so far by lattice QCD. We present the dependence on the volume and temperature of this distribution. We find that for temperatures and volumes encountered in heavy-ion reactions, the multiplicity distribution is very close to the Skellam distribution, making the experimental determination of it rather challenging. We further provide estimates for the statistics required to measure cumulants of the net-baryon and net-proton distributions.

We construct a multiplicity distribution characterized by large factorial cumulants (integrated correlation functions) from a simple combination of two ordinary multiplicity distributions characterized by small factorial cumulants. We find that such a model, which could be interpreted as representing two event classes, reproduces the preliminary data for the proton cumulants measured by the STAR collaboration at 7.7 GeV very well. This model then predicts very large values for the fifth and sixth order factorial cumulants, which can be tested in experiment.

In this note, using the simplified colour string model, we study the configuration space distribution of stopped nucleons in heavy-ion collisions. Given this model, we find that the stopped nucleons from the target and the projectile end up separated from each other by a distance which increases with the collision energy. In consequence, for the center-of-mass energies larger than 6 or 10 GeV (depending on the details of the model), it appears that the stopped nucleons are not necessarily in thermal and chemical equilibrium, and the net-baryon density reached is likely not much higher than that already present in the colliding nuclei.

The dependence of multiproton correlation functions and cumulants on the acceptance in rapidity and transverse momentum is studied. We find that the preliminary data of various cumulant ratios are consistent, within errors, with rapidity and transverse momentum-independent correlation functions. However, rapidity correlations which moderately increase with rapidity separation between protons are slightly favored. We propose to further explore the rapidity dependence of multiparticle correlation functions by measuring the dependence of the integrated reduced correlation functions as a function of the size of the rapidity window.

We discuss the relation between particle number cumulants and genuine correlation functions. It is argued that measuring multi-particle correlation functions could provide cleaner information on possible non-trivial dynamics in heavy-ion collisions.

The effects of finite particle number sampling on the net baryon number cumulants, extracted from fluid dynamical simulations, are studied. The commonly used finite particle number sampling procedure introduces an additional Poissonian (or multinomial if global baryon number conservation is enforced) contribution which increases the extracted moments of the baryon number distribution. If this procedure is applied to a fluctuating fluid dynamics framework, one severely overestimates the actual cumulants. We show that the sampling of so-called test particles suppresses the additional contribution to the moments by at least one power of the number of test particles. We demonstrate this method in a numerical fluid dynamics simulation that includes the effects of spinodal decomposition due to a first-order phase transition. Furthermore, in the limit where antibaryons can be ignored, we derive analytic formulas which capture exactly the effect of particle sampling on the baryon number cumulants. These formulas may be used to test the various numerical particle sampling algorithms.

In this review, we examine the current theoretical and experimental status of the chiral magnetic effect. We discuss possible future strategies for resolving uncertainties in interpretation including recommendations for theoretical work, recommendations for measurements based on data collected in the past five years, and recommendations for beam use in the coming years of RHIC. We specifically investigate the case for colliding nuclear isobars (nuclei with the same mass but different charge) and find the case compelling. We recommend that a program of nuclear isobar collisions to isolate the chiral magnetic effect from background sources be placed as a high priority item in the strategy for completing the RHIC mission.

In this paper we discuss the relation of particle number cumulants and correlation functions. It is argued that measuring couplings of the genuine multiparticle correlation functions could provide cleaner information on possible nontrivial dynamics in heavy-ion collisions. We extract integrated multiproton correlation functions from the presently available experimental data on proton cumulants. We find that the STAR data contain significant four-proton correlations, at least at the lower energies, with indication of changing dynamics in central collisions. We also find that these correlations are rather long ranged in rapidity. Finally, using the Ising model, we demonstrate how the signs of the multiproton correlation functions may be used to exclude certain regions of the phase diagram close to the critical point.

We investigate possible effects of correlations between stopped nucleons on higher order proton cumulants at low energy heavy-ion collisions. We find that fluctuations of the number of wounded nucleons Npart lead to rather nontrivial dependence of the correlations on the centrality; however, this effect is too small to explain the large and positive four-proton correlations found in the preliminary data collected by the STAR collaboration at s=7.7 GeV. We further demonstrate that, by taking into account additional proton clustering, we are able to qualitatively reproduce the preliminary experimental data. We speculate that this clustering may originate either from collective/multi-collision stopping which is expected to be effective at lower energies or from a possible first-order phase transition, or from (attractive) final state interactions. To test these ideas we propose to measure a mixed multi-particle correlation between stopped protons and a produced particle (e.g. pion, antiproton).