In our very first episode of stories straight from the heart of matter, we have dived right inside the protons. We have learned about the internal structure of these basic and yet complex building blocks of matter from our guest, Dr. Robert L. Jaffe from MIT.

In our second episode of stories straight from the heart of matter, we have talked about the spin on the proton and how we can study spin structure with our expert, Dr. Renee Fatemi from the University of Kentucky.

In our third episode of stories straight from the heart of matter, we talk about the connections between the Electron-Ion Collider and High-Energy Physics, in particular parton distribution functions. What are parton distribution functions or short PDFs, how we extract them, and why they are of importance for Nuclear and High-Energy Physics, we learn from our expert, Dr. Tim Hobbs of Argonne National Laboratory. Further Reading John Collins, Davison Soper, and George Sterman review factorization theorems and their proofs.

In our fourth episode of “Stories Straight from the Heart of Matter,” we discuss Lattice QCD—a method for calculating observables of the strong interaction using methods of statistical physics and advanced computing. We explore exactly how this works and the role Lattice QCD will play for the Electron-Ion Collider with our expert, Professor Martha Constantinou of Temple University. Further Reading Rajan Gupta’s lecture notes provide a pedagogical introduction to Lattice QCD.

A century after the birth of quantum mechanics, advances in quantum science and technology continue. Transverse-momentum-dependent PDFs (TMD PDFs, or simply TMDs) offer a powerful way to probe the 3D structure of protons, neutrons, and nuclei, and to test quantum theory at its limits. In our fifth episode of “Stories Straight from the Heart of Matter,” we explore the internal structure of nucleons through TMDs with our expert, Elena Boglione from University of Turin.