Session 2WA: Physics Opportunities with EIC II

Jet energy loss in hot and cold nuclear matter

Jet quenching, observed in heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC, is a result of substantial final state interactions that cause high energy jets to lose a sizable fraction of their energy to the deconfined matter formed in such collisions. Understanding how jets interact with this QCD matter is crucial in order to quantitatively probe it and is currently an active field of research. In addition to providing a tool to investigate nuclear structure, the study of jet fragmentation in electron-ion collisions may shed light on the mechanisms of jet energy loss and transport properties of cold nuclear matter. I will review in this talk the recent developments in the theory of jet quenching and discuss physics opportunities at a future EIC.   

Next-generation nuclear physics with polarized light ions at EIC

The EIC will enable a program of high-energy electron/photon scattering on light ions with polarized beams (deuteron, 3He) and forward detection of the nuclear breakup state (spectator tagging, coherent processes). Physics objectives include the precise determination of the neutron spin structure, studies of the QCD origin of nucleon interactions (nuclear modification of partonic structure, short-range correlations), and the quark/gluon imaging of light nuclei (nuclear generalized parton distributions). The detected nuclear breakup state can be used to infer the nuclear configuration during the high-energy process and provides essential new information for physics analysis. Such reactions explore the intersection of high-energy scattering and low-energy nuclear structure and pose many interesting questions in theory, analysis, and simulation. The talk will give an introduction to the light-ion physics program with EIC, including the physics concepts and objectives, examples of simulated measurements, the forward detection capabilities of the EIC designs, and available resources for further study (simulation tools). The presentation will be aimed at a general nuclear/hadronic physics audience.   

Collective Effects in Nucleons and Nuclei

In the first part of the talk I describe high-energy coherent scattering from a nucleus. Here, a colored probe scatters from the color field generated collectively by many sources whose low transverse momentum modes have large occupation numbers. I provide examples for how this regime of non-linear color fields could be probed at the EIC. In the second part of the talk I address color charge correlators in the proton and how these relate to Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) for exclusive processes. Using photon diffraction into charmonium as an example, I discuss the importance of multi-particle GPDs in $J/\Psi$ and $\eta_c$ production.