Electron Ion Collider: The Next QCD Frontier - Understanding the glue that binds us all

Understand

This White Paper presents the science case of an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), focused on the structure and interactions of gluon-dominated matter, with the intent to articulate it to the broader nuclear science community.

• It was commissioned by the managements of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) with the objective of presenting a summary of scientific opportunities and goals of the EIC as a follow-up to the 2007 NSAC Long Range plan.
• This document is a culmination of a community-wide effort in nuclear science following a series of workshops on EIC physics and, in particular, the focused ten-week program on "Gluons and quark sea at high energies" at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Fall 2010.
• It contains a brief description of a few golden physics measurements along with accelerator and detector concepts required to achieve them, and it benefited from inputs from the users' communities of BNL and JLab.