​The US-based Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) project, approved since December 2019, is rapidly progressing towards realization, with the goal of starting operation in the early 30’s.

 

The EIC’s ability to collide high-energy electron beams with high-energy ion beams will provide access to those regions in the nucleon and nuclei where their structure is dominated by gluons. Moreover, highly polarized (~70%) electron and light nucleus beams in the EIC will give unprecedented access to the spatial and spin structure of gluons and sea-quarks in the proton and light nuclei. The EIC will be characterized by high luminosities, 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than that at HERA, over a very wide range of center-of-mass energies from 21 up to 140 GeV.

 

Correspondingly demanding are the requirements for physics detector(s) that will be needed to carry out the compelling EIC physics program: hermetic coverage in tracking, calorimetry and particle ID within a wide pseudorapidity range, and substantial angular and momentum acceptance in the hadron-going direction. The electron-Proton and Ion Collider (ePIC) detector is a key component of the project designed to deliver the whole EIC physics scope. The completion of its design is quicky converging towards the 2025 goal of the Technical Design Report. The compact detector concept imposes fine resolution in track reconstruction, while the role of electrons in the overall physics programme imposes high performance electromagnetic calorimetry. High quality hadronic calorimetry in the forward direction will support the measurements with jets in the final state. Unprecedented for a collider detector are the stringent particle identification requirements, which will require various technologies to cover the entire momentum range at different rapidities.

 

The seminar will give an overview of the ePIC detector design and the adopted technologies, also providing a connection between physics requirements and the simulations studies.