Nuclear and particle physicists in the UK will lead preliminary work to help design its some of the detector technologies for the vast, complex experiment. They are supported with £3m funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The work will continue for almost three years.
The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will be built on the existing Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) facility at Brookhaven, the only large particle accelerator in operation in the US. Particle accelerators like the RHIC accelerates beams of ions to near the speed of light and causes them to collide, revealing their internal structure.
The EIC will be focused on the strong interaction, the strongest of the four fundamental interactions, which is responsible for binding the constituents of nuclei and thus holding together matter. Scientists will be able to investigate how quarks (fundamental matter particles which interact with the strong force) and gluons (the...