This workshop aims to develop plans and collaborations through which existing and foreseen experiments at JLab (location: Newport News, Virginia, USA) can provide insights into the two most important unsolved problems within the Standard Model; namely, the origin of hadron mass and the confinement of gluons and quarks. Duality between the quark-gluon fundamental degrees of freedom and the meson-baryon effective degrees of freedom will be exploited among the experts in various QCD motivated theoretical approaches to come up with the unified phenomenological description both for the hadron resonances and the hard exclusive processes. It will canvass a wide range of experiment and theory, e.g.

(a) nuclear femtography with computation and measurement of the momentum and spatial distributions of partons inside a hadron using new opportunities from semi-inclusive DIS, DVCS and DVMP experiments in the 12 GeV era, and diverse array of methods in order to expose emergent phenomena via quasiparticle formation,

(b) exploring the dynamics and impacts of hadron mass generation with hadron elastic and transition form factors,

(c) prospects for contributions from lattice- regularized QCD. 

The potential for a combined experiment-theory effort to gather the information necessary to provide the hadron imaging with hard processes and solve the problems of mass generation and confinement has recently been demonstrated in the successful description of JLab data on pion and nucleon elastic form factors, and a number of nucleon resonance electroexcitation amplitudes using continuum bound-state methods. This analysis has unified a large body of experimental results on hadron elastic and transition form factors within a single framework and thereby provided strong evidence to support universality of the dynamically generated dressed-quark mass function, whose existence and behavior are predicted by both continuum and lattice methods. 

In the absence of quantum effects, the appearance of the non-zero, dynamically generated mass for the proton and other hadrons in the chiral limit of QCD is impossible. Hence, experiment-theory connections that provide confirmation of its existence are plausibly the best means to probe the strong dynamics that lie at the heart of mass generation. JLab is the only facility in the world today (and for the foreseeable future) that is capable of unravelling the structure of ground- and excited-state hadrons. Indeed, with its 12-GeV electron beam, JLab can utilize a remarkable range of hadron structure parameters that are interpretable in QCD and extracted from experiment– elastic and transition form factors, and a host of parton distributions – that can be used to chart the transition from the Standard Model’s perturbative domain, characterized by weak interactions among gluons and quarks, into the domain of strong-QCD, a phase within which all measurable phenomena are emergent and the origin of 98% of the visible mass in the Universe is to be found. Crucially, theory that can directly connect these measurements with QCD is now reaching maturity, so that the data can be mined for the information need to solve the Standard Model’s most pressing questions. A remarkable synergy currently exists between the capacities and interests of experiment and theory; and the purpose of this workshop, therefore, is to gather world-class experimentalists and theorists in order to capitalize on existing successes and foster new collaborative efforts that will lead JLab through the 12-GeV era, and also explore novel avenues for physics at a future electron ion collider

(EIC) with nuclear femtography.

Existing JLab collaborations, e.g. between JLab and ANL (USA), Indiana Univ. (USA), the Univ. of South Carolina (USA), Irfu/SPhN, CEA, Saclay (France), CNRS/IN2P3, Orsay (France), INFN of Genova (Italy), INFN of Roma (Italy), Giessen Univ. (Germany), Tuebingen Univ. (Germany), Yerevan Physics Institute (Armenia), Moscow State Univ. (Russia), Boskovic Institute (Croatia), and the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (Korea) that includes many institutions in Korea and the Asia-Pacific region will be strengthened and new teams will be built, involving scientists from Korean universities and research institutes, in particular. We expect the discussions to be lively and productive, and we will encourage the participation of early-career researchers, whose future depends heavily on the successes we can achieve now and build upon with an EIC.