Gluons and the Quark Sea at High Energies: Distributions, Polarization, Tomography

This report on the science case for an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is the result of a ten-week program at the Institute for Nuclear Theory (INT) in Seattle (from September 13-November 19, 2010), motivated by the need to develop a strong case for the continued study of the QCD description of hadron structure in the coming decades. Hadron structure in the valence quark region will be studied extensively with the Jefferson Lab 12 GeV science program, the subject of an INT program the previous year. The focus of the INT program was on understanding the role of gluons and sea quarks, the important dynamical degrees of freedom describing hadron structure at high energies. Experimentally, the most direct and precise way to access the dynamical structure of hadrons and nuclei at high energies is with a high luminosity lepton probe in collider mode. An EIC with optimized detectors offers enormous potential as the next generation accelerator to address many of the most important, open questions about the fundamental structure of matter. The goal of the INT program, as captured in the writeups in this report, was to articulate these questions and to identify golden experiments that have the greatest potential to provide definitive answers to these questions. At resolution scales where quarks and gluons become manifest as degrees of freedom, the structure of the nucleon and of nuclei is intimately connected with unique features of QCD dynamics, such as confinement and the self-coupling of gluons. Information on hadron sub-structure in DIS is obtained in the form of 'snapshots' by the 'lepton microscope' of the dynamical many-body hadron system, over different momentum resolutions and energy scales. These femtoscopic snapshots, at the simplest level, provide distribution functions which are extracted over the largest accessible kinematic range to assemble fundamental dynamical insight into hadron and nuclear sub-structure. For the proton, the EIC would be the brightest femtoscope scale lepton-collider ever, exceeding the intensity of the HERA collider a thousand fold. HERA, with its center-of-mass (CM) energy of 320 GeV, was built to search for quark substructure. An EIC, with its scientific focus on studying QCD in the regime where the sea quarks and gluons dominate, would have a lower CM energy. In a staged EIC design, the CM energy will range from 50-70 GeV in stage I to approximately twice that for the full design. In addition to being the first lepton collider exploring the structure of polarized protons, an EIC will also be the first electron-nucleus collider, probing the gluon and sea quark structure of nuclei for the first time. Following the same structure as the scientific discussions at the INT, this report is organized around the following four major themes: (1) The spin and flavor structure of the proton; (2) Three dimensional structure of nucleons and nuclei in momentum and configuration space; (3) QCD matter in nuclei; and (4) Electroweak physics and the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. In this executive summary, we will briefly outline the outstanding physics questions in these areas and the suite of measurements that are available with an EIC to address these. The status of accelerator and detector designs is addressed at the end of the summary. Tables of golden measurements for each of the key science areas outlined are presented on page 12. In addition, each chapter in the report contains a comprehensive overview of the science topic addressed. Interested readers are encouraged to read these and the individual contributions for more details on the present status of EIC science