Speaker
Description
One of the most puzzling aspects of the Standard Model is that the overwhelming majority of the mass of hadronic systems arises from massless and nearly massless objects. How this occurs is poorly understood, and remains a major open question of the standard model. From the little that we do understand, we know that mass generation is intricately connected to the internal structure of hadronic systems. Emergent Hadronic Mass is an elemental feature of the Standard Model. It is the origin of a running gluon mass, the source of Dynamical Chiral Symmetry Breaking, and very probably crucial to any explanation of confinement. Somewhat counter intuitively, it is one of the lightest hadronic objects, the charged pion, that may be able to fill in the missing piece of the puzzle. Advancing our understanding of the internal structure of the charged pion is crucial if we are to begin to untangle how this structure emerges from the dynamical nature of the interactions that govern it.
Fortuitously, in the coming decade we will see the construction of the only new accelerator facility scheduled to be built anywhere in the world, the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). An upgrade of the electron beam energy at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab), to 22 GeV, is also expected within this time frame. Both facilities can be utilised to advance our understanding of pion structure. In this talk, I will outline the prospects for future studies of pion structure at an upgraded 22 GeV JLab and at the EIC. In particular, I will examine the opportunities for future measurements of the charged pion elastic electromagnetic form factor, $F_{\pi}(Q^{2})$, deep into experimentally unexplored territory at both facilities, with a focus on the complementarity of these measurements.
