Speaker
Description
A new high energy collider is being built to upgrade the capabilities
of the existing Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven
National Laboratory (BNL). RHIC has been a critical facility for exploring
QCD through collisions of polarized protons and heavy ions for more than
25 years. RHIC uncovered the properties of hot QCD matter, leading to
the discovery of a strongly interacting QGP, jet quenching, and helped
to understand the contribution of the gluons’ polarization to the overall
polarization of the proton. These achievements motivate the need for a
versatile high energy electron proton collider that is under construction
at BNL and aptly named the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). The EIC will
be used to address some of the most fundamental questions in QCD,
including the origins of proton mass and spin. This talk will discuss the
ongoing upgrade of RHIC into the EIC facility, the requirements of such
a facility to answer these open questions in QCD and the new detector
(ePIC) being constructed to achieve those goals.