SMU Physics Department Speaker Series - Dr. Darin Acosta (Rice University)
Channel: Stephen Sekula
Date: 2021-11-16

A Muon-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory

We propose the development and construction of a novel muon-ion collider (MuIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) as an upgrade to succeed the electron-ion collider (EIC) that is scheduled to commence in the early 2030s, by a joint effort of the nuclear and particle physics communities. The BNL facility could accommodate a muon storage beam with an energy up to about 1 TeV with existing magnet technology. When collided with a 275 GeV hadron beam, the MuIC center-of-mass energy of about 1 TeV will extend the kinematic coverage of deep inelastic scattering physics at the EIC (with polarized beams) by more than an order of magnitude in Q2 and x, opening a new QCD frontier to address many fundamental scientific questions in nuclear and particle physics. Additionally, the development of a MuIC will focus the worldwide R&D efforts on muon collider technology and serve as a demonstrator toward a future muon-antimuon collider at O(10) TeV energies, which is an attractive option to reach the next high energy frontier in particle physics at an affordable cost and a smaller footprint than a future circular hadron collider. We discuss here the possible design parameters of the MuIC, kinematic coverage, science cases, and detector design considerations including estimates of resolutions on DIS kinematic variables.