3Q: Richard Milner on a new U.S. particle accelerator
The case for an ambitious new particle accelerator to be built in the United States has just gotten a major boost. Today, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have endorsed the development of the Electron Ion Collider, or EIC. The proposed facility, consisting of two intersecting accelerators, would smash together beams of protons and electrons traveling at nearly the speed of light. In the aftermath of each collision, scientists should see “snapshots” of the particles’ inner structures, much like a CT scan for atoms. From these images, scientists hope to piece together a multidimensional picture, with unprecedented depth and clarity, of the quarks and gluons that bind together protons and all the visible matter in the universe. The EIC, if built, would significantly advance the field of quantum chromodynamics, which seeks to answer fundamental questions in physics, such as how quarks and gluons produce the strong force —...