The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) partner host labs, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Jefferson Lab, have announced Professor Carsten P Welsch, Head of Liverpool’s Accelerator Science cluster based at the Cockcroft Institute, as co-chair of the EIC Accelerator Collaboration.
Professor Welsch has a broad experience in accelerator physics and technology, and in establishing collaborative environments with international participation. His research covers the development of advanced instrumentation, medical applications, data intensive science, antimatter physics, and novel high gradient accelerators. He has led numerous large scale international projects and is a member of a large number of advisory panels.
Professor Welsch will share his duties with Prof Andrei Seryi (Jefferson Lab and Old Dominion University). This leadership team will establish a formal international collaboration, rooted in the 2020 and 2021 EIC accelerator workshops, which attracted hundreds of participants from more than 20 countries, as well as numerous technical meetings with representatives from national and international institutions.
The construction of the EIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory marks the establishment of a world-leading facility for nuclear physics. The design, construction, and future upgrades of the EIC will have many exciting scientific and technical challenges, creating opportunities for a worldwide accelerator collaboration to become part of this exciting venture.
The EIC will be a particle accelerator that collides electrons with protons and nuclei to produce snapshots of those particles’ internal structure—like a CT scanner for atoms. The electron beam will reveal the arrangement of the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons of nuclei. The force that holds quarks together, carried by the gluons, is the strongest force in Nature. The EIC will allow us to study this “strong nuclear force” and the role of gluons in the matter within and all around us. What we learn from the EIC could power the technologies of tomorrow.
The EIC Accelerator Collaboration will benefit the EIC project, its collaborating partners, and the wider community of accelerator experts. Furthermore, it will play an important role in enhancing the developments of the evolution, upgrades, and the ultimate performance of the EIC facility.
The collaboration kick-off meeting will be held as a satellite meeting at the IPAC2024 conference in May 2024 in Nashville, TN, USA.
Further information about the EIC: https://www.bnl.gov/eic/