The next major facility construction in the US is the Electron-Ion Collider planned at Brookhaven National Laboratory. A science assessment by the National Academy of Sciences (https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25171/an-assessment-of-us-based-electron-ion-collider-science) found three central questions that the facility should address, and among these is "How does the mass of the nucleon arise?"
This question goes to the essence of QCD and embodies many of its mysteries and emergent phenomena, such as color confinement. Its understanding is fundamental to the future of nuclear physics, and we think that addressing this question within QCD will expose deep connections and significantly impact the broader fields of cosmology, particle physics, condensed matter, and biology.
In the spirit of the questions posed by Hilbert in the 1900 Mathematics Congress and the Millennium Prize Problems in Mathematical Physics, we would like to identify key theoretical questions to further inform and guide the science program of the Electron-Ion Collider. Our hope is that by posing the right questions this workshop can have a lasting impact on our understanding of the visible universe.
More broadly, this workshop will address and hone key questions related to the proton mass. It is organized around four interelated areas which include the broader fields of physics, the fundamentals of QCD, lattice calculations, hadron models, and last but not least to experiments and specific observables.
A sample of questions includes: