NPA Seminar, Kong Tu, Brookhaven, “Shining light through nuclear matter to see why they matter - a scientific journey to understand the visible world”

Understanding what our material world is made of has been an ultimate question for humankind for as long as our existence. Yet modern science and technology have enabled us to “see” objects at vastly different scales, from stars in distant galaxies to atomic particles, the fundamental origin of these matter and their strong interactions are far from understood. One of the most intriguing questions, the color confinement, is of particular interest, where quarks and gluons are forever clumped in the form of hadrons. One may ask, what role does gluon play in confinement as well as in the fundamental property of hadrons? How do these properties change in different conditions? How are gluons distributed inside of a hadron? Answers to these questions are nowhere evident in the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), and the same questions in the complex nuclei are even less known.
In this talk, I will briefly introduce how we came a long way to understand the microscopic world from high energy physics. I will then focus on a special research program based on photon-induced interactions, which has been done at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) to probe the inner structure of nucleon and nuclei. Finally, I will discuss further opportunities at RHIC, the Large Hadron Collider, and especially the upcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). An overview of the EIC science, its connection to the Heavy-Ion physics, and a unified path forward towards the exciting future will be provided.
Host: Nikhil Padmanabhan (nikhil.padmanabhan@yale.edu)