Description
It has been established recently that nuclear collision experiments performed in high-energy collider machines, such as the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), provide a novel tool to observe signatures of the shape and the radial structure of atomic nuclei. By taking snapshots of the state of the colliding ions at the interaction point, such experiments open an access route to a range of phenomena shaped by the collective behavior of nucleons that emerge from the strong nuclear force, such as nuclear deformations and neutron skins. The European nuclear community should explore the potential of a program of high-energy collisions across the Segrè chart to be pursued beyond LHC Run 3 to exploit the synergy between two areas of nuclear science. This will permit us, on the one hand, to advance our knowledge of the conditions that set the stage for the formation of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) in heavy-ion collisions and better constrain key physical parameters associated with the Hubble-like expansion of this medium. On the other hand, full exploitation of the LHC as an imaging tool will advance our understanding of strongly-correlated nuclear systems via probes and techniques complementary to those utilized in low-energy applications. Such studies will ultimately yield unique insight into the behavior of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) across systems and energy scales.