The "Giornate Nazionali EIC_NET 2024" in Bologna are the sixth edition of a series of annual meetings, where the INFN groups interested in future experimentation at the Electron-Ion Collider discuss the current status and prospects of the Italian involvement in the international scientific project. The meeting will be held in English. Attendance to the final session on Friday 28 June is restricted to the groups belonging to the EIC_NET initiative or upon invitation.
Since the first meeting in Bari in 2019 the situation has evolved significantly. The ePIC Collaboration, responsible for the design, construction and operation of the main experiment at the EIC, was established in 2022. In February 2023 John Lajoie (Iowa University) and Silvia Dalla Torre (INFN Trieste) have been elected spokesperson and deputy spokesperson, respectively. By the end of 2024 the Technical Design Report (TDR) of the ePIC experiment at the EIC will be presented. In June 2024 the INFN Nuclear Physics committee (CSN3) granted experiment status to ePIC transforming the EIC_NET networking initiative in a full-fledged experiment "sigla".
The ePIC Collaboration has held four international meetings: at Stony Brook in July 2022, Jefferson Lab in January 2023, Warsaw in July 2023 and at Argonne National Laboratory in January 2024. All meetings have seen active participation from many Italian groups. The next meeting of the ePIC Collaboration will take place at Lehigh University on 22-28 July 2024, jointly with the international meeting of the EIC Users Group. The January 2025 ePIC Collaboration meeting will be held in Rome at Villa Mondragone, organized by INFN Rome Tor Vergata.
