The Electron Ion Collider: A Unique New Microscope for Matter

Abstract: The visible world around us is made up of atoms, with protons and neutrons forming the nuclei at their core. Together, protons and neutrons make up most of the mass of everything we see in the universe today, from massive galaxies to individual people.

Protons and neutrons themselves are complicated many-body quantum states whose properties are determined by the quarks and gluons that they are comprised of. The quest to understand in detail the structure of protons, neutrons and nuclei is nothing less that an attempt to answer the questions ​“What are we made of? What is matter?”

The Electron Ion Collider (EIC), to be built by Jefferson Lab and Brookhaven National Laboratory, will be a unique new machine to collide polarized electrons off polarized protons and light nuclei, providing the capability to study multi-dimensional tomographic images of hadronic matter, and collective effects of gluons in nuclei.

In this colloquium I will motivate the physics program at the EIC and discuss the unique new machine and detectors that will be required to answer these fundamental questions.