PROBING NUCLEONS AND NUCLEI IN HIGH ENERGY COLLISIONS

This book contains proceedings of the 7-week INT program dedicated to the physics of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), the world's first polarized electron-nucleon (ep) and electron-nucleus (eA) collider to be constructed in the United States. The 2015 NSAC Long Range Plan recommended EIC as the "highest priority for new facility construction following the completion of FRIB". The primary goal of the EIC is to establish precise multi-dimensional imaging of quarks and gluons inside nucleons and nuclei. This includes (i) understanding the spatial and momentum space structure of the nucleon through the studies of TMDs (transverse-momentum-dependent parton distributions), GPD (generalized parton distributions) and the Wigner distribution; (ii) determining the partonic origin of the nucleon spin; (iii) exploring the new quantum chromodynamics (QCD) frontier of ultra-strong gluon fields, with the potential to seal the discovery of a new form of dense gluon matter predicted to exist in all nuclei and nucleons at small Bjorken x - the parton saturation. The program brought together both theorists and experimentalists from Jefferson Lab (JLab), Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) along with the national and international nuclear physics communities to assess and advance the EIC physics.