| Abstract: |
The electron-ion Collider (EIC) has been identified as the highest priority new facility by the latest long planning exercise of the US nuclear science advisory council and the department of energy, DOE office of science. It has since been decided by DOE that the EIC is to be build at Brookhaven national laboratory under coordination between Jefferson Lab and BNL, receiving critical decision 1 in 2021. The EIC enables the collisions of polarized electrons with polarized protons and light ions, as well as unpolarized heavy ions with center-of-mass energies between about 30 to 140 (100 for ions) GeV. The main physics goals of the EIC are to understand how the strong interaction creates 99% of the visible mass of the universe, bound in nucleons. As such, the tomography of the nucleon, including its spin, flavor, transverse momentum and position dependence are the key goals, particularly for gluons and sea quarks. These, in turn, provide important additional information for LHC physics such as the higher-x dependence of parton distributions or the intrinsic transverse momentum dependence that impacts any heavy boson production process, known or unknown. Using heavy ions, the EIC can study the nonlinear dependence of gluons at high gluon densities that in turn impact low-x processes, the cold baseline for Heavy ion collision data and may shed light on the so-called color-glass condensate. In this seminar, I will introduce the EIC project, its design and planned timeline and will discuss a selection of the main physics goals.
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