The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN have been offering unprecedented opportunities to study quantum chromodynamics since 2000 and 2009, respectively, through proton-proton, proton-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus collisions. The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will be a next-generation facility dedicated to the study of QCD, using electron-proton and electron-nucleus collisions. It is planned for construction at BNL and expected to start taking data in the early 2030s. Over the upcoming decade, what we learn from RHIC and the LHC about the quark and gluon structure of nucleons and nuclei, the various mechanisms by which colored quarks and gluons form new colorless bound-state hadrons, and color flow in hadronic interactions will set the stage for a wide range of QCD phenomena to be explored in greater detail at the EIC.
