ForewordThe study of the fundamental structure of nuclear matter is a central thrust of physics research in the United States. As indicated in Frontiers of Nuclear Science, the 2007 Nuclear Science Advisory Committee long range plan, consideration of a future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is a priority and will likely be a significant focus of discussion at the next long range plan. We are therefore pleased to have supported the ten week program in fall 2010 at the Institute of Nuclear Theory which examined at length the science case for the EIC. This program was a major effort; it attracted the maximum allowable attendance over ten weeks.This report summarizes the current understanding of the physics and articulates important open questions that can be addressed by an EIC. It converges towards a set of "golden" experiments that illustrate both the science reach and the technical demands on such a facility, and thereby establishes a firm ground from which to launch the next phase in preparation for the upcoming long range plan discussions. We thank all the participants in this productive program. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the leadership and dedication of the five co-organizers of the program who are also the co-editors of this report.David Kaplan, Director, National Institute for Nuclear Theory Hugh Montgomery, Director, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility Steven Vigdor, Associate Lab Director, Brookhaven National Laboratory iii Preface This volume is based on a ten-week program on "Gluons and the quark sea at high energies", which took place at the Institute for Nuclear Theory (INT) in Seattle from September 13 to November 19, 2010. The principal aim of the program was to develop and sharpen the science case for an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a facility that will be able to collide electrons and positrons with polarized protons and with light to heavy nuclei at high energies, offering unprecedented possibilities for in-depth studies of quantum chromodynamics. Guiding questions were• What are the crucial science issues?• How do they fit within the overall goals for nuclear physics?• Why can't they be addressed adequately at existing facilities?• Will they still be interesting in the 2020's, when a suitable facility might be realized?The program started with a five-day workshop on "Perturbative and Non-Perturbative Aspects of QCD at Collider Energies", which was followed by eight weeks of regular program and a concluding four-day workshop on "The Science Case for an EIC".More than 120 theorists and experimentalists took part in the program over ten weeks. It was only possible to smoothly accommodate such a large number of participants because of the extraordinary efforts of the INT staff, to whom we extend our warm thanks and appreciation. We thank the INT Director, David Kaplan, for his strong support of the program and for covering a significant portion of the costs for printing this volume. We gratefully acknowledge additional financial support provided by BNL and JLab.The program w...

We report on our calculation of the nucleon axial charge gA in QCD with two flavours of dynamical quarks. A detailed investigation of systematic errors is performed, with a particular focus on contributions from excited states to three-point correlation functions. The use of summed operator insertions allows for a much better control over such contamination. After performing a chiral extrapolation to the physical pion mass, we find gA = 1.223 ± 0.063 (stat) +0.035 −0.060 (syst), in good agreement with the experimental value.

An ab initio nonadditive three-body potential for argon has been developed using quantum-chemical calculations at the CCSD(T) and CCSDT levels of theory. Applying this potential together with a recent ab initio pair potential from the literature, the third and fourth to seventh pressure virial coefficients of argon were computed by standard numerical integration and the Mayer-sampling Monte Carlo method, respectively, for a wide temperature range. All calculated virial coefficients were fitted separately as polynomials in temperature. The results for the third virial coefficient agree with values evaluated directly from experimental data and with those computed for other nonadditive three-body potentials. We also redetermined the second and third virial coefficients from the best experimental pρT data utilizing the computed higher virial coefficients as constraints. Thus, a significantly closer agreement of the calculated third virial coefficients with the experimental data was achieved. For different orders of the virial expansion, pρT data have been calculated and compared with results from high quality measurements in the gaseous and supercritical region. The theoretically predicted pressures are within the very small experimental errors of ±0.02% for p ≤ 12 MPa in the supercritical region near room temperature, whereas for subcritical temperatures the deviations increase up to +0.3%. The computed pressure at the critical density and temperature is about 1.3% below the experimental value. At pressures between 200 MPa and 1000 MPa and at 373 K, the calculated values deviate by 1% to 9% from the experimental results.

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