The Present and Future of QCD: QCD Town Meeting White Paper – An Input to the 2023 NSAC Long Range Plan

It is currently understood that there are four fundamental forces in nature: gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong forces. The strong force governs the interactions between quarks and gluons, elementary particles whose interactions give rise to the vast majority of visible mass in the universe. The mathematical description of the strong force is provided by the non-Abelian gauge theory Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). While QCD is an exquisite theory, constructing the nucleons and nuclei from quarks, and furthermore explaining the behavior of quarks and gluons at all energies, remain to be complex and challenging problems. Such challenges, along with the desire to understand all visible matter at the most fundamental level, position the study of QCD as a central thrust of research in nuclear science. Experimental insight into the strong force can be gained using large particle accelerator facilities, which are necessary to probe the very short distance scales over which quarks and gluons interact. The Long Range Plans (LRPs) exercise of 1989 and 1996 led directly to the construction of two world-class facilities: the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab (JLab) that is focused on studying how the structure of hadrons emerges from QCD (cold QCD research), and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) that aims at the discovery and study of a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), at extremely high temperatures (hot QCD research). These past investments have produced major advances. Nucleons and nuclei are being studied with increasing precision with a unified description of the partonic structure utilizing multi-dimensional imaging. Significant progress has been made, paving the way towards a complete picture of how quarks and gluons give rise to the mass, spin, and momentum of the nucleon. In hot QCD, the QGP is created in the collisions of nuclei at RHIC and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and is observed to behave like a fluid with very low specific shear viscosity; the current goals are to understand how the fluid behavior emerges from QCD and to characterize the temperature (and chemical potential) dependence of the properties of the QGP. As this White Paper is written, current experimental programs at CEBAF, RHIC and the LHC continue to provide exciting near term opportunities to capitalize on the investments in experimental equipment and accelerator operations. Most importantly, the QCD community looks forward to the construction of the Electron Ion Collider (EIC) as a major new facility to push forward QCD research in the next decades, with significant focus on exploring the properties of gluons, the mediators of the strong force.