Abstract

Our understanding of the structure of matter, encapsulated in the Standard Model of particle physics, is that protons, neutrons, and nuclei emerge dynamically from the interactions of underlying quark and gluon degrees of freedom. I will describe how first-principles theory calculations have given us new insights into this structure, including recent predictions of the contributions of gluons to the pressure and shear distributions in the proton, which will be measurable for the first time at the planned Electron-Ion Collider. I will also discuss studies of light nuclei which provide insights relevant to long-baseline neutrino experiments seeking to constrain the neutrino masses and mixing parameters, searches for evidence of the Majorana nature of neutrinos through neutrinoless double beta decay, and dark matter direct detection experiments. Finally, I will explain how provably exact machine learning algorithms are providing new possibilities in this field.