Revealing the structure of light pseudoscalar mesons at the Electron-Ion Collider

Understand

How the bulk of the Universe's visible mass emerges and how it is manifest in the existence and properties of hadrons are profound questions that probe into the heart of strongly interacting matter.

• Paradoxically, the lightest pseudoscalar mesons appear to be the key to the further understanding of the emergent mass and structure mechanisms.
• These mesons, namely the pion and kaon, are the Nambu-Goldstone boson modes of QCD.
• Unravelling their partonic structure and the interplay between emergent and Higgs-boson mass mechanisms is a common goal of three interdependent approaches -- continuum QCD phenomenology, lattice-regularised QCD, and the global analysis of parton distributions -- linked to experimental measurements of hadron structure.