Development of Polarized Lithium Sources for EIC

In the next decades, the U.S.-based Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will be one of the premier collider facilities for hadronic and nuclear physics. Among the crucial science goals of EIC beyond those articulated by the National Academy of Sciences report and EIC White paper is to explore the quark and gluon structure of nuclei. One essential knob in this investigation is the spin of the nucleus. The spin-dependent structure of the nucleus can only be accessed with polarized beams. The polarized light ion beams, including H, D, and 3He, are already part of the EIC project, and their science has been extensively discussed in those reports. However, making also polarized ion beams with A>3 available will undoubtedly expand the scientific reach of EIC and benefit critical accelerator technologies.

A good example is the polarized lithium-6 and lithium-7 nuclei, ideal sources for spin-dependent studies since they allow to probe the nuclear medium modification of the spin-1/2 nucleon target or the scalar spin-1 deuteron target. Among the subjects that will be investigated are the polarized EMC effect and its A-dependence, hidden color, and six-quark contributions to the deuteron (embedded in lithium-6) through measurements of the *b1* structure function and the gluon transversity. In this talk, we report the development progress for polarized lithium-6 and lithium-7 sources at Argonne National Laboratory. The potential physics programs with such sources at EIC will also be discussed.