The 2026 CFNS Summer School on the Physics of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) hosted by the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science (CFNS) at Stony Brook University, USA, June 1-12, 2026. This will be the seventh in the series that started in 2019.
The school will feature lectures and tutorials on theoretical and experimental topics related to the physics of the EIC. Additionally, the workshop will include "hands-on" tutorial sessions. The workshop is ideally suited for advanced graduate students and postdocs in nuclear and particle physics.
[TO BE DETERMINED: The school fee is $50, the participants of the workshop will have support for lodging and meals for the duration of the workshop.]
Applications are now open https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/29200. The deadline for full consideration is 19 January 2026.
The Electron-Ion Collider is the world’s first polarized electron-nucleon (ep) and electron-nucleus (eA) collider planned for construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, by the U.S. Department of Energy. The ePIC detector collaboration has been formed and is working with the EIC Project to realize the first collider detector. The possibility of a second detector in the future is under discussion. The Electron-Ion Collider will be a discovery machine for unlocking the secrets of the "glue" that binds the building blocks (protons and neutrons) of visible matter in the universe. The EIC will start construction in mid-2025, and the first collisions are planned for the early 2030s.
The key physics questions that the EIC will address are:
- How do the nucleonic properties, such as mass and spin, emerge from partons and their underlying interactions?
- How are partons inside the nucleon distributed in both momentum and position space?
- How do color-charged quarks and gluons, and jets, interact with a nuclear medium? How do the confined hadronic states emerge from these quarks and gluons? How do the quark-gluon interactions create nuclear binding?
- How does a dense nuclear environment affect the dynamics of quarks and gluons, their correlations, and their interactions? What happens to the gluon density in nuclei? Does it saturate at high energy, giving rise to gluonic matter or a gluonic phase with universal properties in all nuclei and even in nucleons?
This series of EIC Summer workshops are planned to introduce participants to all aspects of the EIC - science, detector, and collider challenges so that they can enter the exciting field of EIC physics at the QCD Frontier.
We typically host & support 35 participants for this workshop. Participants in the workshop will receive support with lodging and meals throughout the workshop. Applications typically open in December, and the review of applications begins in January. The workshops are held in person at Stony Brook University.
The workshop features lectures and tutorials on theoretical and experimental topics related to the physics of the EIC. Additionally, the workshops include "hands-on" tutorial sessions. The workshops are ideally suited for advanced graduate students and postdocs in nuclear and particle physics.
Confirmed lecturers:
- AAA (BBB)
- Abhay Deshpande (SBU)
Organizing Committee:
- Ross Corliss (Stony Brook)
- Abhay Deshpande (SBU & BNL, CFNS Director)
- Fred Olness (SMU)
- Alexei Prokudin (Penn State University, Workshop Chair)
Administrative support:
- Socorro Delquaglio (CFNS, Stony Brook)
- Melissa Laguerre (CFNS, Stony Brook)
