Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 49: Hadron Structure and Spectroscopy VI

HK 49.1: Group Report

Thursday, March 13, 2025, 15:45–16:15, HS 3 Physik

The ePIC experiment at the Electron-Ion Collider: Exploring the mysteries of the building blocks of matter — •Stefan Diehl for the ePIC collaboration — Justus Liebig Universität Gießen and University of Connecticut

The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is an advanced, new accelerator facility under development at Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA), expected to start operation in the early 2030s. It will collide polarized electrons with high-energy beams, ranging from heavy ions to polarized light ions and protons, at a center-of-mass energy between 20 and 140 GeV and peak luminosities up to 10³⁴ cm⁻²s⁻¹. These unique characteristics provide the basis for answering fundamental questions about the strong force and how it holds matter together, by taking three-dimensional precision snapshots of the inner structure of protons and atomic nuclei. It is expected to make important contributions to the proton spin puzzle, the understanding of quark- and gluon-confinement, the origin of the nucleon mass, the behavior of quarks and gluons in nuclei, and many more aspects. To achieve these physics goals, up to two detectors will be built. One such detector, which is in an advanced design phase, is the Electron-Proton and Ion Collider detector (ePIC). It applies a compact detector concept able to achieve fine track reconstruction resolution, combined with high-performance electromagnetic and hadronic calorimetry and particle identification over a wide kinematic range. This talk will present an overview of the EIC, the ePIC detector concept, and its physics program, with a special focus on the discovery potentials in the field of nucleon structure.

Keywords: Electron-Ion Collider; ePIC; EIC