Experience with R&D projects for the EIC, and the international context

The need for R&D was realized early by the community and laboratories that were working towards an EIC. In January 2011 Brookhaven National Laboratory, in association with Jefferson Lab and the DOE Office of Nuclear Physics, created a generic detector R&D program to address the scientific requirements for measurements at an EIC. The primary goals of the program was to develop detector concepts and technologies that have particular importance to experiments in an EIC environment and to help ensure that the techniques and resources for implementing these technologies are well established within the EIC user community. It was also meant to stimulate the formation of user groups and collaborations that will be essential for the ultimate design effort and construction of the EIC experiments. The program ended successfully in 2021 with over 280 participant from 75 institutions more than half of them non-US. While dominated by NP groups it included many colleagues from HEP, solid state physics and other fields. Many of the subsystems in the ePIC detector at the EIC were developed and matured in this program. This program was continued by a targeted EIC R&D program that aims at achieving the maturity required to carry out final design and construction of ePIC. In 2022 the generic R&D program was reinstated by DOE. It supports the development of technologies that are not ready for ePIC but that would offer superior technologies down the road and could be used in a 2nd EIC detector and for future ePIC upgrades ensuring that the EIC stays on cutting-edge. This talk will give an in depth description of the past and ongoing programs.