Particle production in high energy collisions is a powerful tool to understand nature from microstructure, such as particle formation, to its macrostructure such as the creation of the Universe, and therefore always attracts high interest. Substantial efforts have been applied to study particle production experimentally, to search for new features and check theoretical predictions. From cosmic rays to bubble chambers at modern facilities such as particle accelerators, LEP, Tevatron, RHIC, and the LHC, particle production is always on the frontier of investigation. A number of findings, expected or not, provide an important fundamental knowledge helping to build a modern physics picture, to understand the interaction forces.

Whereas hard (or high transverse momentum) particle production can be well described and predicted by theory, the soft sector of low momentum particles is still not fully understood and faces difficulties in description by the theory of strong interactions, and Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The first measurements - usually made experimentally - are those of the soft sector such as multiplicities and distributions of kinematic variables and are one of the most important to understand strong interaction dynamics. Recently, many interesting observations have been made in particle and heavy-ion collisions in this area, such as ridge effect, anisotropic flow, and strange suppression, which were expected for nuclear collisions but led to new discoveries in proton-proton interactions.

New experimental programs and further theoretical investigations are on the way. Further understanding, interesting observations, and exciting findings in particle production are expected to probe new physics, make more discoveries, and shed light on the still uncovered corners of the nature.

This Special Issue aims to publish upcoming results on particle production and welcomes original research articles as well as reviews on the subject.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Theoretical and experimental investigations of the production of particles in different types of collisions and in a wide energy range
• Contemporary particle production measurements and future projects
• Modern technologies and detectors, novel data handling techniques, and machine learning for particle production
• New physics and discoveries in particle production at accelerators and in cosmic rays