[2] In 2020, The United States Department of Energy announced that an EIC will be built over the next ten years at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, at an estimated cost of $1.6 to $2.6 billion.
[3] On 18 September 2020, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held at BNL, officially launching the development and building of the EIC.
Brookhaven National Laboratory's conceptual design, eRHIC, proposes upgrading the existing Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which collides beams of light to heavy ions including polarized protons, with a polarized electron facility.
The weaker a mode of interaction is, the higher luminosity is required to reach an adequate measurement of the process.
Some of the remaining mysteries associated with atomic nuclei include how nuclear properties such as spin and mass emerge from the lower level constituent dynamics of quarks and gluons.
[8] In the year 2022, the Office of Science in Department of Energy reported that the budget for Electron–Ion Collider would be $30M, while the project required $120M to meet its defined milestone in 2023, causing the EIC pre-construction schedule to be "stretched".