The United States Department of Energy (DOE) and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) have signed a “Statement of Interest” to collaborate on the construction of the world’s first-ever Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).
Scheduled to be built in the U.S. at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in partnership with DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), the agencies say that the ultra-powerful collider will allow researchers an unprecedented ability to “explore the building blocks of matter and the strongest force in nature.”
“The EIC is the only collider planned to be constructed anywhere in the world in the next decade—and the first to collide a beam of high-energy polarized electrons with a counter-circulating beam of high-energy polarized protons or heavier ions,” a statement from the Brookhaven National Laboratory explains. “A sophisticated detector will capture snapshots of these collisions to reveal how the particles and forces at the heart of atomic nuclei build up the structure and properties of everything we see in the universe today—from stars to planets to people.”
Hellbound and Down 