Towards the next QCD Frontier with the Electron Ion Collider

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA
² Department of Physics, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
³ Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA
⁴ C.N.Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA

^a e-mail: abhay.deshpande@stonybrook.edu
^b e-mail: meziani@temple.edu
^c e-mail: jqiu@bnl.gov,Speaker

Published online: 25 March 2016

Abstract

In this talk, we argue that the proposed Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) with its unique capability to collide polarized electrons with polarized protons and light ions at unprecedented luminosity, and with heavy nuclei at high energy, will be the most powerful tomographic scanner able to precisely image gluons and quarks inside the proton and nuclei. This precision microscope will allow us to “see” and explore the dynamics binding gluons and quarks together to form hadrons. The EIC will address the most compelling unanswered questions in QCD and hadron physics.