Relazione su invito
The EIC physics case.
Radici M.
The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is a new accelerator being built at the U.S. Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The EIC will host collisions at high luminosity between electrons and ions ranging from proton to Uranium, with 70% polarized beams for electrons and light ions (proton, deuterium, helium, tritium) at variable center-of-mass energy between 20 and 140 GeV. The EIC physics case focusses on important open questions about the structure of hadrons: 1) How do properties of nucleon (mass, spin, ...) emerge from quark-gluon interactions inside it? 2) How do nuclear forces and binding emerge from the QCD dynamics of colored objects? 3) Does gluon density saturate at high energy, giving rise to a universal gluonic matter? I will briefly overview this physics case, highlighting some examples of the expected EIC impact on our current understanding of this field.