The white paper of Electron-Ion Collider in China (EicC), a future high energy nuclear physics project proposed by scientists, was published in Frontiers of Physics on June 25.   

Understanding the visible world that we are living in is of fundamental importance to modern sciences. As the building blocks of visible matter, nucleons (protons and neutrons) are composed of quarks and gluons. However, many basic questions remain unanswered. For example, how do the quark and gluon constituents contribute to the spin and the mass of a nucleon?  

Scientists at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), together with collaborators at home and abroad, have proposed an Electron-Ion Collider in China to carry out dedicated research to explore these open questions.  

In this white paper, researchers presented the main physics goals, detector and accelerator conceptual design of EicC, which was proposed to be constructed based on an upgraded heavy-ion accelerator, High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF).  

More than 100 scientists from 47 institutes contributed to the writing of the white paper. After reaching this milestone, the EicC working group is now moving forward towards the conceptual design report. 

The full document of the EicC white paper can be downloaded here: 

https://journal.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/10.1007/s11467-021-1062-0 

Fig. The cover of the EicC white paper. (Image from Frontiers of Physics)