Physical Society Colloquium

The glue that binds us all: imaging matter below the Fermi scale with an Electron-Ion Collider

Raju Venugopalan

Nuclear Theory Group
Brookhaven National Laboratory

A future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will probe the structure of strongly interacting matter down to distance scales as small as 10-18 meters (thousandth of a Fermi), with luminosities a hundred to a thousand times brighter than a previous such collider. High resolution images of the momentum, spatial, spin and orbital distributions of gluons and sea quarks in light and heavy nuclei will become available, many of these as first measurements. We outline how these images will help resolve outstanding puzzles in our understanding of the many-body dynamics of quarks and gluons that fundamentally make up the structure of nearly all visible matter in the universe.