Center for Particles and Fields Seminar

Dr. Pawel Nadel-Turonski, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

"Probing the cold QCD frontier - physics and detectors for the Electron-Ion Collider"

4:00pm, RLM 9.222

Abstract: Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is a beautiful theory describing the strong interaction between subatomic particles, which is responsible for generating almost all the mass of the visible universe. But the strong coupling in the confinement regime, where quarks bind to form the building blocks of matter, makes the phenomenology elusive. New experimental tools are thus needed to fully understand the mass and spin of the proton, its spatial structure, or the dramatic rise in the density of force carriers with low momenta (gluons at low-x), which eventually saturates. This cold-QCD frontier will in the next decade be explored at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), which will give us the capability of colliding polarized beams of electrons and a wide range of nuclei - from hydrogen to uranium. This new generation of experiments will also require a new generation of detectors, allowing detection and identification of all produced particles and target fragments - even those emerging from the collision inside the envelope of the beam, requiring an unprecedented level of integration between accelerator and detector. This talk will give an overview of the physics goals and detector development for the EIC - focusing on the most unique features such as target remnant detection and particle identification.