Eur. Phys. J. A (2017) 53: 71
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2017-12251-4

Review

Pre-Town Meeting on spin physics at an Electron-Ion Collider

¹ Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 11973, Upton, NY, USA
² Physics Department, Old Dominion University, 23529, Norfolk, VA, USA
³ Jefferson Lab, 12000 Jefferson Avenue, 23606, Newport News, VA, USA
⁴ SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, 94309, Stanford, CA, USA
⁵ Department of Physics, New Mexico State University, 88003-8001, Las Cruces, NM, USA
⁶ RIKEN BNL Research Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 11973-5000, Upton, NY, USA
⁷ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, SUNY, 11794-3800, Stony Brook, NY, USA
⁸ Deutsches Elektronen-Synchroton DESY, 22607, Hamburg, Germany
⁹ Division of Science, Penn State University-Berks, 19610, Reading, PA, USA
¹⁰ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 61801, Urbana, IL, USA
¹¹ INPAC, Department of Physics, and Shanghai Key Lab for Particle Physics and Cosmology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200240, Shanghai, China
¹² Center for High-Energy Physics, Peking University, 100080, Beijing, China
¹³ Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics, University of Maryland, 20742, College Park, MD, USA
¹⁴ Los Alamos National Laboratory, 87545, Los Alamos, NM, USA
¹⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, 90095, Los Angeles, CA, USA
¹⁶ Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, 90095, Los Angeles, CA, USA
¹⁷ Iowa State University, 50011, Ames, IA, USA
¹⁸ Dept. of Physics and Astronomy Center for Computational Sciences, University of Kentucky, 40506, Lexington, KY, USA
¹⁹ Department of Physics, University of Virginia, 22904, Charlottesville, VA, USA
²⁰ Nikhef and Department of Physics and Astronomy, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081, NL-1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
²¹ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 94720, Berkeley, CA, USA
²² Institute for Theoretical Physics, Tübingen University, Auf der Morgenstelle 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

^* e-mail: lpg10@psu.edu

Received: 14 February 2017
Accepted: 6 March 2017
Published online: 14 April 2017

Abstract

A polarized ep/eA collider (Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC), with polarized proton and light-ion beams and unpolarized heavy-ion beams with a variable center-of-mass energy to GeV (upgradable to GeV) and a luminosity up to cm^-2s^-1, would be uniquely suited to address several outstanding questions of Quantum Chromodynamics, and thereby lead to new qualitative and quantitative information on the microscopic structure of hadrons and nuclei. During this meeting at Jefferson Lab we addressed recent theoretical and experimental developments in the spin and the three-dimensional structure of the nucleon (sea quark and gluon spatial distributions, orbital motion, polarization, and their correlations). This mini-review contains a short update on progress in these areas since the EIC White paper (A. Accardi et al., Eur. Phys. J. A 52, 268 (2016)).