The next dream machine for U.S. nuclear physicists got an important boost today in a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report committee glowingly approved of the science that could be done with the proposed Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a billion-dollar accelerator that would probe the innards of protons and neutrons. The endorsement should help the Department of Energy (DOE) justify building the EIC at one of two national laboratories competing to host it, although the project probably won’t get the go-ahead for several years.
“We’re basically saying, ‘You’ve really got to do this,’” says Ani Aprahamian, a nuclear physicist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and co-chair of the report committee.
An Isotopia 