Description
We propose the development of a muon-proton and muon-nucleus collider, referred to as a ``muon-ion collider'' (MuIC) [1,2], that utilizes the existing hadron accelerator facilities at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) or CERN while seeding, or leveraging, the development of a high-energy muon storage ring at the same site. A muon-proton center-of-mass energy of up to 1 TeV at BNL (6.5 TeV at CERN) can be achieved when a 1 TeV (1.5 TeV) muon beam is brought into collision with a 0.275 TeV (7 TeV) proton beam at that facility. Such a MuIC would enable deep inelastic scattering measurements in completely new regimes at low parton momentum fraction $x$ and high squared four-momentum transfer $Q^2$, which will further elucidate the structure of the proton and of nuclei as well as provide precision QCD and electroweak measurements complementary to those done at lepton and hadron colliders.
[1] D. Acosta and W. Li, Nucl. Instrum. Meth.A 1027 (2022) 166334.
[2] D. Acosta et. al., arXiv:2203.06258, a white paper submitted to Snowmass 2021.