NPI Co-Organized the 5th Meeting of the EIC International Financial Committee at BNL

On June 5–6, 2025, the fifth meeting of the Resource Review Board (RRB) of the international Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) project took place at Vila Lanna in Prague. The meeting was held under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (MEYS) and was jointly organized by the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague (FNSPE CTU) and the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (NPI CAS).
The EIC is currently the only approved new large-scale international accelerator facility, to be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in the United States.

Representatives of member countries and funding agencies discussed the progress in the accelerator’s preparation and its key experimental program, which will be carried out through the international ePIC experiment. In the opening presentation, EIC Project Director Dr. Jim Yeck outlined the current status of the preparations, including a significant new contribution from the Czech Republic: the development of a laser source in collaboration with scientists from FNSPE CTU in Prague.
Czech teams are also actively involved in the development and preparation of silicon detectors, the calorimeter, and the luminosity detector for the ePIC experiment, as highlighted in the talks by ePIC spokespersons Prof. John Lajoie (ORNL, USA) and Prof. Silvia Dalla Torre (INFN, Italy). For the silicon detectors, we plan to perform radiation hardness tests at the NPI cyclotrons, continuing our very successful contributions in this area for the ALICE experiment at CERN.
In the future, the NPI microtron could also be used to test crystals planned for production at CRYTUR Turnov.

Scheduled to begin operations in 2032, the EIC is of fundamental scientific importance. It will be the first facility of its kind to explore the internal structure of the proton in three dimensions with unprecedented precision, using collisions of polarized electron and polarized proton beams. This will deepen our understanding of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) – the theory describing the strong interaction between quarks and gluons.
The EIC will also enable studies of polarized electron–nucleus collisions to better understand so-called cold nuclear matter and saturation effects.
NPI’s involvement in the EIC builds on its longstanding experience and successful participation in the STAR experiment at the RHIC accelerator at BNL, which focuses on the study of hot and dense quark-gluon plasma (QGP) and the spin structure of the proton. The ePIC experiment will be constructed at the same location in the coming years.

This research is supported by MEYS as part of the BNL-CZ research infrastructure (LM2023034).

Photo: David Březina, FNSPE CTU

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