Development of Polarized Lithium-6 Source for EIC

The U.S.-based Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will be one of the premier collider facilities for hadronic and nuclear physics in the following decades. One essential science goal of the EIC is to understand the spin of the nucleon and nucleus. The spin-dependent structure can only be accessed with polarized beams, and the polarized light ion beams including H, D, and ³He are already part of the EIC project, with the science extensively discussed. 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 nucleus which is interesting to probe modification of the spin-1/2 nucleon target or the scalar spin-1 deuteron target. Measurements with the polarized Lithium-6 source will allow the investigation of the polarized EMC effect and its A<!--[if gte msEquation 12]> style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A dependence, hidden color and six quarks contributions to the deuteron embedded in Lithium-6. In this talk, we report the development of a polarized Lithium-6 source at Argonne. The polarized system utilizes a high-temperature oven and a convergence-divergence nozzle to generate a uniform Lithium-6 beam, which is then polarized through the optical pumping. The science with polarized Lithium sources, the technical details of the development, and some measurements of the beam profile will be discussed.