eRHIC Design Study: An Electron-Ion Collider at BNL

Understand

This document presents BNL's plan for an electron-ion collider, eRHIC, a major new research tool that builds on the existing RHIC facility to advance the long-term vision for Nuclear Physics to discover and understand the emergent phenomena of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental theory of the strong interaction that binds the atomic nucleus.

• We describe the scientific requirements for such a facility, following up on the community-wide 2012 white paper, 'Electron-Ion Collider: the Next QCD Frontier', and present a design concept that incorporates new, innovative accelerator techniques to provide a cost-effective upgrade of RHIC with polarized electron beams colliding with the full array of RHIC hadron beams.
• The new facility will deliver electron-nucleon luminosity of 10^33-10^34 cm-1sec-1 for collisions of 15.9 GeV polarized electrons on either 250 GeV polarized protons or 100 GeV/u heavy ion beams.
• The facility will also be capable of providing an electron beam energy of 21.2 GeV, at reduced luminosity.