0000000000543856
AUTHOR
M. A.c. Lamont
Electron Ion Collider: The Next QCD Frontier - Understanding the glue that binds us all
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 a…
Nuclear structure functions at a future electron-ion collider
The quantitative knowledge of heavy nuclei's partonic structure is currently limited to rather large values of momentum fraction $x$---robust experimental constraints below $x\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ at low resolution scale ${Q}^{2}$ are particularly scarce. This is in sharp contrast to the free proton's structure which has been probed in Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) measurements down to $x\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}5}$ at perturbative resolution scales. The construction of an electron-ion collider (EIC) with a possibility to operate with a wide variety of nuclei, will allow one to explore the low-$x$ region in much greater detail. In the present paper we simula…