Speaker
Description
The international Electron Proton Ion Collider (ePIC) experiment collaboration has formed to design and construct the first detector to be ready at the beginning of operation of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a new collider to be built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This new facility aims to understand the properties of nuclear matter and its emergence from the underlying partonic structure and dynamics of quarks and gluons, thanks to its high luminosity (10$^{33}$ – 10$^{34}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ and polarized beams with $\sqrt{s_{ep}}$= 28 – 140 GeV.
Almost a quarter of century after the shutdown of the HERA collider, this new microscope for nuclear matter will start operations. By measuring inclusive and semi-inclusive DIS and exclusive processes in electron-proton/ion collisions, the emergence of nuclear properties can be studied by precisely imaging gluons and quarks inside protons and nuclei, such as their distributions in space and momentum, the role of quarks and gluons in building the nucleon spin and the properties of gluons in nuclei at high energies, including the possibility to probe the gluon saturation regime.
The planned measurements demand challenging detector capabilities in terms of hermeticity, energy resolution, tracking precision, particle identification and required pseudorapidity coverage. The ePIC detector will be located at the IP6 interaction region of the EIC accelerator and it is planned to be completely built by mid-2031 to start commissioning with cosmics and early accelerator operations. The ePIC planned physics performance as well as the main choices for its detector sub-systems will be described, emphasizing the novel aspects in terms of technologies being used in this new high-energy physics experiment. The design status of ePIC and future path toward project approval and construction will be discussed.
| Collaboration / Activity | ePIC Collaboration |
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