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Billion-dollar Electron-Ion Collider gets thumbs up
A machine that would allow scientists to peer deeper than ever before into the atomic nucleus is a big step closer to being built. A high-level panel of nuclear physicists is expected to endorse the proposed Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) in a report scheduled for publication by October. It is unclear how long construction would take.
The panel is the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, or NSAC, which produces regular ten-year plans for the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation. Its latest plan is still being finalized, but NSAC’s long-range planning group “strongly recommended” construction of the EIC at a meeting last month, says NSAC member Abhay Deshpande, a nuclear physicist at Stony Brook University in New York. The EIC will almost certainly be formally endorsed in the NSAC report, he says. It must then be approved by the DOE, but most projects backed by the expert panel have come to fruition, he says.
The collider would allow unprecedented insights into how protons and neutrons are built up from quarks and the particles that act between them, known as gluons.
