Speaker: John Lajoie
Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Iowa State University

Title: The ELectron Ion Collider: A Unique New Microscope for Matter

Abstract: The visible world around us is made up of atoms, with protons and neutrons forming the nuclei at their core. Together, protons and neutrons make up most of the mass of everything we see in the universe today, from massive galaxies to individual people. Protons and neutrons themselves are complicated many-body quantum states whose properties are determined by the quarks and gluons that they are comprised of. The quest to understand in detail the structure of protons, neutrons, and nuclei is nothing less that an attempt to answer the questions "What are we made of? What is matter?" The Electron Ion Collider (EIC), to be built by JLab and BNL, will be a unique new machine to collide polarized electrons off polarized protons and light nuclei, providing the capability to study multi-dimensional tomographic images of protons and nuclei, and collective effects of gluons in nuclei. In this colloquium I will motivate the physics program at the EIC and the unique new machine and detectors that will be required to answer these fundamental questions.

Bio: John Lajoie is the Harmon-Ye Professor of Physics at Iowa State University. His research interests include fundamental QCD, understanding the detailed properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma, and the structure of hadrons and nuclei. He was the Level-2 manager for construction of the sPHENIX hadronic calorimeters, and currently serves on the Steering Committee for ePIC, the first detector to be built at the future Electron Ion Collider (EIC).